Author: James Desborough
Date: 2017-08-08 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Postmortem Studios

Table of Contents

Inside Gamergate

Chapter One: Introduction

Biography

Inside Gamergate

Chapter Two: Inside Baseball

The Chans
Trolling
Social Justice Warriors
Internet Culture
Memes
Doxxing and Anonymity
Gamers Vs 'People who Play Games'
Normies
Vivian James

Chapter Three: Context

Moral Panics
Wertham & the Comics Code
The Satanic Panic & BADD
The PMRC
Jack Thompson
The Porn Panic
Youtube

The New Moral Panic

A Quick Side Note About Censorship

Occupy Wall Street

Atheism Plus

Anita Sarkeesian

Side Note: Synergistic Trolling

'Entitled' Gamers
#CancelColbert
Women in Tech
Online Bullying/Harassment
Existing Corruption Issues
The Indie Scene
Pseudo-Academia
Gamergate's Place in this Narrative
What's Different About Gamergate

Chapter Four: Franz Ferdinand

Zoe Quinn & Depression Quest

My Previous Support

Zoe's Bad Actions

Wizardchan
Helldump
The Fine Young Capitalists
Polaris Game Jam

The Zoe Post
Five Guys & Quinnspiracy
Censorship
Gamergate

Chapter Five: Gamergate Itself

Culture & Politics

The Baldwin Tweet
Anti-Censorship
Something Rotten in Games Media
Gamergate's Politics
Blockbots and Echo Chambers
Feminism & Men's Rights

Effective Protest

Unity
Operation Disrespectful Nod
#NotYourShield
Tag-Flooding
Alternative Media
Distributed Organisation

Pseudoacademia
The United Fucking Nations!?
'Fake News'
Gamers are Dead
Gamejournopros Exposed
Silverstring Media
Bring Back Bullying
SPJ & Airplay
Reforms
Clickbait & Gawker
Media Stupidity
Gamergate Vs Revolt Vs Baphomet Vs Trolls

Chapter Six: Harassment, Violence & Censorship

Was Gamergate a Harassment Campaign?

Definitions
Evidence
Gamergate Harassment Patrol
Trolling
Sock Puppets

Paedophiles and Sex Criminals, Everywhere
Doxxing
Personal Censorship
The Battle for Wikipedia
Calgary Expo
RedditRevolt & Youtube Censorship
CON Leaks & ZachAttack

Cashing In: From Milo to Sarkeesian

Milo & the New-Right
Brianna Wu
Randi Harper
Katherine Clark & Other Politicians
Women in Tech
Sarkeesian
The Sarkeesian Effect

Chapter Seven: Gamergate in Summation

Who Won & Who Lost?
Charity & Fund-Raising
Reform
Cultural Shift
Gamedropping
Rewriting History

Legacy

Other Battles
Internet Censorship
The Great Meme War
A Shift to the 'Not Left.'
New Vs Old Media
An Uncertain Future

Last Minute, Last Night

Parting Comments

References

Inside Gamergate

Written by: James 'Grim' Desborough

Layout by: James Desborough & Michael Garcia

Ebook Conversion by: Michael Garcia

'Inside Gamergate' © Postmortem Studios (James Desborough) 2017

Chapter One: Introduction

It's the night of the sixteenth of October 2014, and I am sitting in a bathtub with a razor blade – retrieved from a carefully smashed 'safety razor'. I'm cutting into my arm over and over, trying to build the courage up for those two, vertical death slices to my wrists.

Why am I doing this? Why is blood running down my arm from cuts to my shoulder, bicep and forearm? Why am I in such a state of despair?

Because of Gamergate.

No, I'm not a woman in tech, 'cruelly bullied' and 'marginalised' because of my ovaries.

I'm not a brave 'white knight' standing up for some cyberpunkish damsel in distress.

I'm not an 'entirely innocent' games' journalist under assault from legions of paranoid, anonymous, online trolls.

No. I'm not a victim of Gamergate - which is already being painted as an online misogynist hate mob.

I'm part of Gamergate.

I want to kill myself mostly because I suffer from severe clinical depression and bouts of suicidal ideation, but this particular incident has been triggered - not by Gamergate - but by its opposition. It has been set off by the crushing weight of disappointment that comes from a whole community of creative people letting me down; personally and professionally.

I want to kill myself because hobbies I consider myself a maker and fan of – games, fiction, comics, geek media in general - have betrayed their audience and their right to creative freedom.

I want to kill myself because people I once respected and trusted are uncritically buying into bullshit and letting corruption and censorship slide. They're ending friendships and blacklisting writers, artists and developers because they tacitly support censorship, corruption and debunked sob stories. Meanwhile, I stand for free expression, ethical media and scepticism.

I want to die because this community, one I saw come together in the 80s and 90s to fight The Satanic Panic and Jack Thompson's crusade, is now the one prosecuting a new moral panic. They're calling everything and everyone sexist, racist, misogynistic, bigoted and a host of other damaging buzzwords. They're trying to censor the very creativity that they once defended. The self-same creativity that I depend on to make a living, that they depend on to make a living. It's a masochistic act of self-destruction, and they're threatening to take a lot of other people down with them.

For someone whose life has been games since before their age reached double digits, who has made it their career, who has fought to defend games against this kind of nonsense for three decades. For me, this revelation and their capitulation is utterly soul destroying.

The people coming after me, the group that was already coming after me since before Gamergate, are not an anonymous mob of ignorable internet trolls. They're people with names and faces. They're 'social critics'. They're 'journalists'. They're fellow authors and game designers, they're writers with columns in papers I used to read. The hate they unleash, the nonsense they spout, the doxxing, harassment, lies and slander that they engage in is passing and will pass, largely, without the criticism or attention heaped on harmless, meaningless trolls.

It's the people in Gamergate who end up coming together to make sure that I'm alright. The same fans who are getting lied about and called monsters. It's Gamergate who contact my wife and the emergency services to ensure I don't succeed in killing myself. These people who, we're going to be told, are heartless abusers, even terrorists. They go out of their way to save my life.

Two weeks or so after my attempt, medicated up to the eyeballs and therapied within an inch of my life, I get a razor blade sent to me – anonymously – in the post. I don't know who sent it, but I'm reasonably sure it's not someone from Gamergate. I burn it, in the envelope, bury it and try to forget about it, but these events have bought Gamergate an ally for life and its opponents a steadfast enemy.

For over two years, the same people who came together to help preserve my existence and protect our hobbies are going to be monstered and have lies told about them. Lied about because they objected to corruption in games media. Monstered because they took a stand against censorship from a new moral panic. Their story goes largely ignored. The threats, the doxxing, the razor blades – and worse – sent to them, the bomb threats at their events and meetings, the disgusting behaviour of their opponents. It's all ignored.

Their story threatens, now, to be ignored forever as Gamergate slips into history. Ignored, or worse, lied about as the 'victims' of Gamergate put out their slanted narratives. The hopes of getting the mainstream media to examine the events honestly slips out of the realm of possibility as its no longer news. Gamergate is now just a bogeyman to invoke when talking about the Internet. In a peculiar twist of fate and a reversal of the standard state of affairs, it's not the victors who are going to write the history; it's the people who lost.

That's why this book exists, to record what happened from within Gamergate. It's here to set the record straight, to give my point of view. The perspective from Gamergate that is being systematically erased, rewritten and ignored.

I don't tell any of this to you for sympathy or to paint myself as a victim. I do it to show you that what you've been told about what happened wasn't accurate. That Gamergate wasn't a misogynistic hate movement or 'alt-right' and that there's plenty of bad behaviour to go around on the 'other side' of the argument.

You just never got to hear about it.

Biography

My name is James 'Grim' Desborough. The 'Grim' comes from a college nickname, due to a propensity for making sick, twisted jokes, and being a miserable goth (my parents were divorcing at the time, which didn't help). I took the name as my own to give the middle finger to the people picking on me, and it has stuck ever since. That probably tells you a lot about my attitude.

I'm an author and a game designer. Mostly I write genre fiction and work in tabletop games - role-playing games to be precise. I've done some work on card games and board games, as well as a couple of social media oriented games but mostly I work in analogue rather than digital. I'd like to work more in computer games, but if you can't code the opportunities are scarce.

The Munchkin phenomenon was half my fault. My writing partner and I wrote the comedy book that kicked off the whole franchise.

I've been working professionally as a game designer and writer since 1999, as an amateur since around 1992 and have been a gamer of one kind or another since I was eight or nine. I was part of Gamergate from before it was even named Gamergate and stayed engaged with it until it petered out in 2016, though it has flared up again while I've been working on this book.

To long; didn't read: I'm well placed to talk about Gamergate from a professional, historical, political and personal perspective. There are few people – even self-proclaimed experts – that have the perspective and historical understanding that I think I bring to this discussion. You don't have to believe me though, use this book as a prompt and do your own, independent investigation. I am certain you'll be surprised.

Inside Gamergate

This book exists to record, for posterity, the events of Gamergate from the perspective of someone within Gamergate.

There is a real danger that, what with the media bias against Gamergate and the biased accounts of people like Zoe Quinn being the ones to be archived, that the other side – the right side – will not get recorded. In the future, anyone looking back is likely to encounter an entirely one-sided version of events from people who have been acting very shadily indeed.

As a participant in Gamergate, that worries me.

As a historian, that worries me.

As someone who cares about truth, fairness and accuracy, that worries me.

At the time of writing, there are some other books on Gamergate that are planned to be written. Journalist Brad Glasgow is working on one that breaks down a lot of events and viewpoints on a statistical basis and a neutral standpoint. Others are working on their versions. You should read as many of them as possible, from both sides.

I think I'm uniquely positioned to give an interesting take on what happened. I know the history, I can properly contextualise it within a timeline of other moral panics and responses. I participated in Gamergate. I've seen the aftermath of it. I've seen how it influenced things and how it fits into the broader culture war that has characterised the twenty-teens. I've been targeted by its enemies, who like to portray themselves as good people, and are anything but.

Mostly I want a record from this side, from this point of view. A counter-narrative to the one against Gamergate. Opposition to the stories being told by those who, despite mainly losing the cultural conflict that was Gamergate, are getting to enter their version of events into the record unopposed.

That cannot be allowed to stand.

So here then, is my story, from Inside Gamergate.

Chapter Two: Inside Baseball

One of the most significant problems in discussing Gamergate, and the things it grew out of – such as internet and gaming culture – is that there are a lot of people that simply don't understand it. Any of it.

I'm creeping into my forties, but I was a relatively early adopter of the internet, frequenting dial-in Bulletin Board systems on an Atari ST before the Internet proper was even really a thing. Back in the days 14.4 dial-up I frequented Usenet, IRC and email mailing lists and was in at some of the formation of what would go on to become today's Internet culture. Despite all this, in a medium as fast-flowing and ever-changing as the Internet, I can't keep up with everything. There are people I went to school with who still don't even have Facebook accounts, so little wonder that many people, who grew up – at least in part – pre-Internet have no real hope of understanding it.

- What is a 'Chan' board?

- Why can't people control the content on the Internet?

- Why is it stupid to expect anyone to be able to?

- What is a troll?

- Why is a 'Social Justice Warrior' a bad thing, rather than a good thing?

- What's a meme?

- What makes someone a Gamer?

- What is doxxing/doxing?

- Is it 'Jif' or 'Gif' and why does it matter?

- Why were gamers so collectively upset, and what were they upset about?

- Why did they, if they really did, harass all these women and minorities?

It goes on and on and on. If we're going to talk about these things, then we need a mutual understanding of some of these terms and concepts. They're going to come up time and time again through this book, so let's help with some of the basics.

The Chans

A 'Chan' board is a message board that anyone can use. The most infamous of these is '4Chan' which, mainly, gave birth to the Internet movement 'Anonymous' and, which is the origin point of a lot of the 'memes' we see spreading further around the Internet.

Even so, a 'Chan' isn't any one, single thing. There are multiple different boards, and each is made up of a huge number of separate and distinct sub-boards. 4Chan, for example, has /pol/ (politically incorrect), which is a political board marked by extreme political discussion and, you guessed it, political incorrectness. It also hosts /v/, which is about video games and a host of other boards devoted to other topics from the supernatural to pornographic manga. While there is crossover between the users of these various sub-boards, a 'Chan' is not a homogeneous or singular thing with a singular culture but rather a collection of things.

Think of it as a town or village board notice board. When you look at it, there might be notes from the church about upcoming meetings, a poster from the school about an open evening, perhaps adverts for yoga classes or a cleaning service. If the parish priest later gets arrested for molesting children, that doesn't reflect on the yoga class, the school or the cleaners. Holding anyone else accountable just because they happened to use the same notice board is a special kind of stupid, yet this is exactly what people do with 'Chan' boards.

The Chan boards also tend to embody the wilder ends of Internet culture, the anti-censorship, 'information wants to be free' culture that values anonymity and even makes a virtue out of it. It is thought, and there's some evidence to support this, that the anonymous nature of the boards means that the best ideas are the ones that thrive (ideas on what constitutes 'best may vary). Stripped of biases about gender, race, etc. the boards are an uncompromising meritocracy where only the best – or at least strongest – ideas survive without all the baggage of physical identity.

One of the most important things to remember about these boards is that they often use sick humour, political incorrectness and 'forbidden language' to self-segregate from 'normal people'. Much of this, even most of it, is ironic and insincere, but if you're not in on the joke, being confronted with 'faggot', 'nigger' and cartoons of the 'happy merchant' are likely to seem shocking. It keeps a lot of people away – and that's the intention. It's like a filter to keep out people who can't handle the culture. Again, with the anonymity, none of these things mean anything – but they do keep the average, sensitive soul, out of the way.

Once the Chan boards were near absolute bastions of free expression, since before 2014 however, the creeping censorship and control we've seen in other parts of the Internet has been seeping into them. The infamous 4Chan even found Gamergate too spicy (perhaps because of sales negotiations) and banned its discussion on their board – leading to a mass exodus to a similar board, 8chan.

'Chan' culture informed a lot of the banter and language of Gamergate, and just like the 'Chans' themselves, if you weren't in on the joke, it was easy to get it wrong. This has been particularly true given the double-whammy of Internet culture self-gatekeeping and the sheer lack of effort on the part of the media.

Trolling

“Whatever else 'troll' might mean, "Anyone who disagrees with me" cannot be a useful definition.”

- Richard Dawkins (Twitter)

Trolling is at least as old as Usenet. It appears to take its name in part from the mythological beasts of legend, and partly from the fishing practice in which bait is slowly dragged through the water to get a bite. When it comes to the Internet, it used to refer to the practice of making deliberately inflammatory, stupid or otherwise provocative comments to stir people up and get them to 'bite', by replying. Well crafted troll messages – often about abortion or religion – could ignite massive flame wars in newsgroups and get hundreds, even thousands of people taking it seriously and getting into arguments.

The term is, these days, often abused to refer to people with genuine and heartfelt disagreements as a way to ignore them, or to excuse blocking them from social media. Many of the people called 'trolls' can be abusive, forceful or dogged (flaming) and many of them will leave an overwhelming number of comments (spamming), but this is distinct from trolling.

'Troll' has become an almost meaningless term when used in the mouths or at the fingertips of many. This is especially true when it comes to the media, but it retains its old meaning to Internet veterans, who are good – if not perfect – at spotting trolls. That the term is abused doesn't, however, mean that trolls do not exist. They very much do, taking advantage of Internet anonymity and the ease of making new accounts to stir people up.

Trolls are attracted to drama and will fake participation in all sides, turning people against each other, provoking them to react, and this is all for the perverse pleasure of culture-jamming; playing people like puppets. To the uninitiated, it can be impossible to tell trolls from genuine critics and participants. Poe's Law[1] makes this even more challenging.

Even worse, trolls - and some aspects of media and activism - appear to have settled into a mutually beneficial arrangement. When a columnist or activist posts something controversial and draws a reaction, they can point to that trolling as some justification for their beliefs and outrageous comments. The trolls, in turn, get publicity and the satisfaction of provoking such a high profile response. Perhaps the best expression of this pointless and entirely theatrical relationship is Lewis' Law[2], which is obvious bunk. If an adverse reaction to an ideological article proves the necessity of that article, that would justify racist, sexist and other hateful articles. A white-nationalist article is obviously going to draw opposition and insults, but that doesn't validate its point of view.

The most important thing to remember about trolls is that they are not sincere. No matter what their personal beliefs they will latch on to anything that upsets someone. If you're a loud, proud and outspoken feminist they will say 'cunt' a lot and tell you to make them a sandwich. If you're religious, they'll argue atheism. If you're an atheist, they will argue religion. If you're fat, they will attack you on that. If you're gay, it will be that. None of it is real, it's smoke and mirrors to try and upset you – and it means nothing.

I've had my share of trolling, and I'll admit that, when younger, I may have engaged in a little of it winding up religious extremists and political nutters. Still, while it can be mean, even at its meanest trolling is mostly harmless. Words on a screen that can be instantly ignored or blocked. Some trolling can be effective, in that it can expose people's double standards, credulity, bias and ignorance but most of it is simply harmless nonsense. There's a distinct and important difference between mere trolling and actual harassment. I've also been a victim of that, and conflating the two is deeply dishonest and undermines the seriousness of genuine harassment.

Social Justice Warriors

By the Oxford English Dictionary, Social Justice is: “Justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.” Who could be against that? How could being a 'warrior' for that be a bad thing?

Well, like a lot of things the dictionary definition doesn't get into the substance of a thing as it occurs in practice.

The term 'Social Justice Warrior' appears to have grown out of the older term 'Keyboard Warrior', referring to someone who was full of forceful talk and opinion online, but who never translated that into action in the real world. A 'Social Justice Warrior' is, then, a particular subset of this. They're the kind of person on the 'left' who feels it necessary to point out and attack anything that they subjectively consider to be sexist, racist or otherwise 'problematic'.

In today's wired-in world the term 'Keyboard Warrior' is no longer quite so stinging. What you do at your keyboard can end up making a real difference. Hashtags make the news, articles spread virally around the world, millions of dollars can be raised for a good cause in a few clicks. The downside is that witch hunts can be spurred just as quickly. Panicking companies and institutions are forced to react, too quickly, often firing people or bowing to the will of Twitter mobs before details are clear, or things have been thought out.

This online shaming and the demolition of the line between one's personal and public life has come to concern many commentators[3]. It has also become a favourite tactic of the 'Social Justice Warriors', who are now referred to by other terms as well, such as The Regressive Left[4]. This term has even expanded to define those who claim to be fighting for something but end up contradicting themselves. Social Justice Warriors, for example, might pretend to be anti-racism but you will find the most virulent racism against white people amongst their ranks, blaming them – collectively – for every ill of the world. Even worse, they will claim that – somehow – it is impossible to be racist against white people. This is the result of seeking to redefine language (the term racism) with a rather specific and limited academic redefinition (prejudice plus power, rather than only prejudice).

Being a Social Justice Warrior is nothing to be proud of though some accused of it have attempted to reclaim the term as something positive. To be an 'SJW' is to be an extremist, a hypocrite and part of a baying, moralising mob of bullies. It's 'Westboro Baptist' to Christian, 'Islamist' to Muslim. Admittedly, the term has been overused to the point of near-meaninglessness, providing impetus for a shift to using the term 'Regressive Left' in more serious discussion. SJW still has power and can be understood, however, as that extreme form of self-defeating 'progressivism' that attacks free speech, becomes racist, becomes sexist and beats people in the street while claiming to be for freedom.

Internet Culture

To understand Internet culture – such as it exists separate from our more overt, mainstream culture – you need to go back to its origins. The Internet is a series of usurpations, each built atop the other. From a military project the Internet became an academic concern and from that – via students – became an idealistic and free platform for exchanges of all kinds. That, in turn, was colonised and usurped by commercial interests and now we have various state and activist actors trying to 'put the genie back in the bottle' by controlling the Internet and the expression upon it.

1. Military Network

2. Academic Information Sharing

3. Counterculture

4. Commercialism

5. State/Activist Control

The defining moment for culture of the Internet was, however, stage 3. Now, to at least some extent, all these different stages are forced to coexist. The counter-cultural element has, however, been the one placed under the most stress by the subsequent waves.

Commercial enterprises do not like the inherent freedom of the Internet as it makes messaging – in the advertising or propaganda sense - difficult [5]. State and activist actors seek to control the Internet for similar – and ideological – reasons [6][7]. The Internet still harbours that idealistic counter-culture and that drives so much of it, from the anarchy of the Chan boards to the lax attitude towards piracy, and the fierce anti-censorship attitude prevalent in many Internet sub-communities. It also fuels the creativity that makes the Internet so relevant and efficient as a counter-cultural accelerant and such a powerful resource.

This concern about state actors online goes back a long way. That first clash, one of the defining moments of Internet culture, is perhaps best enshrined in the grand 'middle finger' that was the 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' [8]. The money quote from that event being:

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

That has become less and less accurate over time, but whereas with state interference “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,”[9] social censorship and activist interference has been harder to combat. Even China's 'Great Firewall' can be gotten around with the right software and perseverance, but being outed, shamed and losing your job over – often a perfectly harmless comment – is not something with a technological solution. No anonymity is perfect.

Internet culture is, then, one founded by leftover hippies, small 'l' libertarians, techno-anarchists, Silicon Valley utopians, internationalists and idealists. It does not tend to react well to control or censorship, whether enacted by the state or any other forces. It is strongest amongst groups and businesses that were early adopters – gamers, science fiction fans and porn producers.

I've always been something of a utopian, dragged down by pragmatism from going completely la-la, but still wanting to see something good, even great. I've also tended to see technology as a way forward. A way of disseminating information, production, data, education and overcoming boundaries.

Certainly, I saw many things change for the better as access to the Internet became ubiquitous. My country's absurd censorship laws around pornography and entertainment couldn't stand up to the Internet and became irrelevant. We could find and distribute adult material and copies of A Clockwork Orange even before high-speed Internet, and nobody could stop us. People could download university reference books without having to take out a second mortgage, and learn by themselves. People could find people like themselves – significant for an isolated, kinky goth kid living in a tiny village. It hasn't been a hundred percent brilliant, but the overall positive, liberating effect has been evident and enormous.

Memes

Technically a meme is described as:

“Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.”[10]

In practice is has come to mean those shared, silly, images that are spread around and appear across social media, such as 'Sad Cat' or 'Pepe the Frog'. Memes in this sense are more like in-jokes, called 'memes' because they spread, virally, shared, re-shared and modified by those who encounter them. Many of them become rather intensely loaded with meaning or require a lot of decoding. They also move and change quickly. Misinterpreting them, getting them wrong or taking them seriously can mean the person doing so is failing a test of comprehension and exposing themselves as an outsider, and object of ridicule.

Pepe the Frog is, perhaps, one of the best examples of how misunderstanding a meme, failing to understand Internet irony and taking things too seriously 'outs' people as being clueless and makes them objects of ridicule. During the 2017 elections in the United States, many people used Pepe in memes to do with the election, mostly using him in conjunction with Donald Trump in one way or another. This was mainly done to 'trigger' (troll and upset) followers of Hilary Clinton. As their reactions grew, the memes only became nastier, 'spicier' and 'danker' (a term appropriated from stoner culture to indicate a meme of particularly good quality and effectiveness).

This got so out of control that Clinton even made the huge tactical error of mentioning Pepe in a speech and the Anti-Defamation League (and others) tried to label Pepe a hate symbol [11]. Needless to say, people found this fucking hilarious and the number of offensive, 'white supremacist' and 'Nazi' Pepes multiplied exponentially to make fun of this reaction and to provoke more of it.

While the US Democratic Party and anti-hate groups were proudly displaying how out of touch they were, trying to redefine ironic memes as hate speech, meme-posters were re-appropriating (or perhaps 'reeeeeee' appropriating) a genuinely offensive meme and disarming it.

'Dindu nuffin'[12], an abbreviation of 'Didn't do nothing' emerged in 2014 alongside the Ferguson riots and the rise of Black Lives Matter. It refers to the typical – if inarticulate – defences made of the victims of police shootings and racists often post this in cartoon form, alongside other phrases like 'He a good boy' and so forth. While in some – even many – cases 'Dindu nuffin' turns out to have been 'something' after all, it was mostly promulgated by racists.

Until memesters got hold of it.

'Dindu nuffin' is now used everywhere, wherever anyone makes a less than convincing excuse for something they've done, or where someone is obviously guilty. You can find it being used about political shenanigans, protest groups, terrorism – you name it.

The Internet makes fun of everything and everyone, often without an agenda. Even when there is an agenda, it won't last long. While being accused of making memes racist and bigoted, the 'memesters' have rather, been doing the opposite. They've re-appropriated, reused, remixed and remodeled racist propaganda and created new and powerful memes via subversion. Agendas and political positions tend to have to be projected onto what is pure, nihilistic, 'South-Parkian' cynical humour.

Memes are more useful and more intelligent than many people think. Consider a Shakespearean quote that you can remember, maybe: 'Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!' The quote itself isn't necessarily the point in and of itself that it's Shakespeare carries meaning, the places it has turned up in other forms of culture (say Star Trek) has meaning. If you attach the quote to a particular actor or performance or image you produce more meaning too.

Internet culture moves fast and accumulates meaning quickly. The meaning and effect of a lot of it requires understanding that history and accumulated culture to discern what is meant. Using a meme can be a way of packing a lot of information into a single image and text combination – this is what makes it so perfect for use, and spreading, in forums and on social media.

I haven't done too well, spawning memes, but I did manage to give anti-Gamergate people one of their most persistent nicknames – 'AGGro'.

This most obviously stems from Anti-GamerGate but is also a reference to Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games where to 'draw aggro' is to get an enemy to attack you. Various attacks and abilities can pull monsters to attack you or cause them to shift who is the target of their attacks within your group. Tough characters may want to get 'aggro'; weaker characters may want to avoid it. Aggro also became slang for enemy creatures and for unexpectedly getting attacking ('training' or 'drawing' aggro). As such it was an almost perfect term for Gamergate's enemies, low tier, easily trolled, easily manipulated creatures that didn't seem to have human intelligence much of the time.

Doxxing and Anonymity

Relative anonymity was the usual state of the Internet, really up until the advent of social media. People used online handles and personas much the way CB Radio operators came up with their handles. You could be a dozen different people on a dozen different forums. You could be anyone or anything, and this was liberating in many ways and a part of the foundational philosophy of the 'Chan' boards. When stripped of identity, ideas can sink or swim by themselves, on their merits – or so is the intention.

Anonymity, as well as freeing people of identity or allowing them to explore it, can also bring out the worst in people. It makes them free to say the most terrible things, share the most repugnant material – such as child pornography – and to scream their untrammelled id into the void. Only it's not a void; it's full of other people. Without anonymity trolling is harder to do. Abuse and piracy become harder to get away with. This is a dark side to the anonymity that the Internet can provide, and we have to admit that it exists.

Then again, besides the meritocratic philosophy of stripping away identity and prejudice, there is value to anonymity and even piracy. With that anonymity it is possible for whistle-blowers to expose corruption, it is possible for LGBT people in difficult home circumstances to find community and fellowship. In theocratic countries, non-believers and freethinkers can make friends and plan to escape, reform or seek asylum. Dissidents can organise without so much fear of reprisal for their thought-crimes. When it comes to piracy, expensive technical books required for University education can be downloaded for free, creating a more egalitarian distribution of education. This also avoids a small amount of extra debt. Copies of rare books, songs and other material can similarly be copied, distributed and safeguarded against being entirely lost.

Online anonymity is, then, a two-edged sword. It has great value, but that comes with a cost in terms of trolling, civil (and uncivil) disobedience and criminality.

Still, that anonymity is valuable and a shield. It is uniquely valuable in the online space, and so threats to that anonymity are incredibly serious and a potential violation of privacy. Exposing someone's real life persona and connecting it to their online activity is known as 'doxxing' (there's some debate over whether it has one or two 'x's). The term comes from 'documents', so to 'dox' is to expose someone's personal information, their address, phone number, identity and so on. This exposes them to contact and confrontation can be used to prank or threaten them (pizza and SWAT teams). Depending on their online activity it can also expose them to arrest and, in some countries, to death at the hands of the mob or state actors.

Currently, things seem to be swinging against online anonymity. Some of this comes from the new online culture that has emerged in the wake of social media. Some of it from companies wanting to track data. Some has come from the state – in various nations – wanting to crack down. Still, to many in Internet culture anonymity is key, even critical, and they're more than willing to pay the price in terms of blockable trolls, to retain it.

Anonymity and alternative identities online have stood me in relatively good stead over the years. Sometimes for good and noble reasons, other times for weak reasons. Multiple accounts used to be a good way of exploiting discounts or special offers, assuming made up identities to get demos of software. It was also a good way of observing people who had a problem with you (and I've had many).

Sometimes it's also fun to pretend to be someone or something other than you are. In this way, you can gain a limited exposure to the point-of-view of 'the other' by adopting their persona. It was certainly educational to assume a female identity and to examine the claims made about women online. I found people tended to be polite, helpful and generous and that I got less harassment, but that it was more sexual. This whole possibility is falling by the wayside, which is a shame, as it does seem to be one of the few ways to eliminate or explore social prejudice

Gamers Vs 'People who Play Games'

To many, this might seem like a distinction without a difference, but within gamer culture, it is an incredibly significant difference. Many statistics and studies claiming to be about 'gamers' aren't aimed at Gamers as they self-identify. They throw their net absurdly wide, to the point where anyone who has played Candy Crush or online Bingo is counted as a 'Gamer'. This skews the gender proportion studies of 'Gamers' out of whack in particular while presenting a contradictory message about needing change to encourage inclusion (if it's already mostly women, why change anything?). More accurate surveys based more around types of game, still show a gender difference – though the gap is slowly closing.

This whole terminology issue is not especially aided by 'Gamer' not really having a definitive definition. Does it only include people who have built their gaming PC? Individuals who've been playing computer games since they were three? Those who know the ins and outs of imported games, play online or play professionally? No, it's wider than that but still does not include those 'filthy casuals' who only play things like Farmville and Angry Birds – no matter how much time or money they happen to throw at those games. It's a term that's hard to pin down, but very meaningful to a lot of people.

To understand the distinction it is, perhaps, best to take a look at analogies from other pastimes with more 'respectability'. It's a little silly that even today, getting towards fifty years from the release of Pong and being an industry worth more than $100 billion, that computer games still aren't taken seriously. That they're still not understood in terms of being an artform.

Consider films.

There is most definitely a difference between someone who takes their nephew to see the newest blockbusters once per season and someone who can rattle off every straight-to-video 1980s horror-schlock classic.

Consider books.

There's a difference between someone with The Davinci Code on their nightstand and someone with shelves and shelves of contemporary and classical fantasy lining their house from top to bottom in every room.

We recognise the difference between a film-goer and a movie aficionado, no matter what genre they're a fan of. We understand the difference between a casual reader and a member of the literati, no matter what type of literature they prefer. The difference between 'Gamer' and 'someone who plays games' is the same. A Gamer is an engaged, active, interested and knowledgeable member of the gaming community for whom gaming is a primary hobby.

Gamers are a core, reliable audience but also a critical one. One that knows the ins and outs of games, one that's demanding, one that understands the form and helps drive it onwards. Without Gamers, the games industry in all its success and glory today could not exist.

Games have been important to me, in one way or another, all my life. More analogue games (board games, card games and especially role-playing games) but games as a whole. My dad was a maths teacher before schools had IT classes and an early adopter of home computing. I cut my teeth on a variety of early home computers that he built, bought or borrowed and those of some of my better off friends. The ZZ Spectrum was a formative experience, from The Off White Knight and MOTOS to Game Over and Everyone's a Wally.

The computer was always something aside from my main love – RPGs – until the advent of 16 bit made games. These were a bit longer and more involving. The technology produced games that could at least somewhat approximate those more satisfying RPG experiences – Bloodwych and Dungeon Master, Midwinter and Carrier Command.

As I got older, it got harder and harder to get people together for tabletop gaming sessions, but computers with Internet access meant you could roleplay whenever you wanted. Multi-User Dungeons to start with, later Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs like Ryzom, Warcraft or Anarchy Online. Then voice-over-IP and online group chat hosting combined the two into one.

I consider myself a gamer, just – perhaps – using that term a bit more broadly than many. After all, it used to refer to tabletop gamers!

Normies

If you don't know all this stuff that I'm describing to you already, then odds are, you're a 'normie'.

Many subcultures have terms for those outside the subculture and whose who aren't 'in the know'. When I was a young goth we referred to those outside the subculture (or allied subcultures) as 'mundanes'. If you've read Harry Potter, then some lines of comparison can be drawn with 'muggles' and the pity or scorn they can attract, if not outright hatred.

'Normies' don't understand Internet culture. They don't get irony or sarcasm. They are 'triggered' by dark humour and the intentionally offensive nature of many memes (when they don't just stare at them in blank incomprehension).

When Internet culture bumps up against 'normies', there is often trouble due to the mutual misunderstanding and lack of shared values. The anonymous, pro-free-speech, rough-and-tumble nature of the Internet can clash intensely with people's fears, prejudices and politics.

When the 'real world' encounters sections of the Internet, it's very easy for it to be misunderstood, monstered and blamed for things. A 'normie' will see what appears to be an anti-semitic cartoon and will conclude that whoever posted it is a Nazi. They will see a meme with 'Aw shit nigga' on it and assume the poster is racist (a cop was fired on this basis!) In context, these needn't be misunderstood, there's a failure to communicate between different cultures.

Vivian James

Vivian James (a play on 'Video Games') is a mascot character originating from polls and discussion on the 4Chan boards /v/ and /pol/. She is meant to embody the 'everyman' gamer, a grumpy, tired-looking obsessive who is fierce in defence of games but who is also a deliberate defiance of the fatwhitemalebasementdweller stereotype that hasn't really been true for some years.

Vivian was created, specifically, to submit as a character – in exchange for sponsorship payments – to The Fine Young Capitalists. TFYC was a charity effort to help encourage young women into gaming, without the same ideologically feminist baggage many similar efforts brought along with them. TFYC had fallen afoul of Zoe Quinn and similar culture-warriors in gaming (more on this later), and were one of the first major charities and causes that the nascent Gamergate movement took up in support of.

Vivian James has since become an important gaming symbol and looks poised to stay around for a long time in comics, games and other material (including Rule 34 – look it up, or don't). This despite people trying to claim she's a hate symbol or a veil for misogyny. As an open-source character, anyone is free to use her, which draws some interesting comparisons with Octobriana[13], another politicised but public domain character.

The existence of Vivian, along with other embodiments of websites and boards, gave Gamergate – and its successor movements – a definite head start in the 'meme wars'. Interestingly, no similar ideas have sprung up and attempts to subvert or devalue Vivian have only backfired, especially her blonde, SJW counterpart, Lillian Woods.

With a basis of understanding, we can now move forwards in greater detail.

Chapter Three: Context

As well as understanding some of the terminology and culture, it's important to comprehend the historical background in which Gamergate existed and that to which it was reacting. It is, after all, a combination of culture and context that best explains why this blew up, and nothing exists in a vacuum.

Gamergate exists as only one of the latest in a long run of cases of resistance to interference in hobbies and pastimes. It does, however, have some differences to many of these classic cases which also helps to explain why it became such a big cultural event even more, as well as existing in an era of ubiquitous social media.

Moral Panics

A moral panic is, according to the Dictionary of Sociology:

“The process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media.”

A 'moral entrepreneur' being someone who wants to attempt to manipulate society and culture to create a new moral norm.

Moral panics are often, however, spurious - and even counterproductive; they are a form of hysteria that grabs the public consciousness to a large enough degree that commercial and state actors often feel like they have to intervene or make changes, even when these are unwarranted.

What might be loosely termed 'Geek Media' has a very long history of being demonised and hated. This occurs both through its incorporation of fringe material and its early adoption of disruptive technology. It also has a long tradition of resistance to moral busy-bodying, with limited success.

I lived through The Satanic Panic, the PMRC's attempts to censor music, the Vampire Panic of the 90s and several other, smaller events. This has certainly coloured my views on the current 'Social Justice' moral panic and the dangers it represents, even – or especially – because people are so convinced they're doing the right thing.

Wertham & the Comics Code

In 1954 the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham published a book called 'Seduction of the Innocent'. In it, he claimed that comic books were corrupting the youth and that they were a significant, contributory cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was seized upon by parents, schools and government and the issue was whipped up into a frenzy of condemnation.

Things rapidly got out of hand, even got to the point where Wertham's scientifically unevidenced ideas gained enough currency and traction to be heard before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. Beyond this, there were problems outside the law as well. There were comics burnings and, more locally, city and state ordinances banned horror comics in particular.

In a panicked response to this chain of events, and fearing truly draconian censorship legislation, the comics and magazine industry created their own voluntary code of self-censorship. This was the Comics Code, which was only, truly, abandoned in the 2,000s.

The code was ludicrous and, to modern eyes, rather quaint – as were similar codes such as the Hays code for film. The Comics Code contained such gems as:

- Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.

- In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

- No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title.

- All lurid, unsavoury, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.

- Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

- Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.

- Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable.

- Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.

One can surely, certainly, draw parallels between the comics code and many of the calls for censorship today. The UK government's list of 'banned acts' in pornography, or their earlier list of controlled material, is not so very different and equally out of touch. The appeals for 'safety' and control are now coming from 'social justice' rather than right-wing Christian moralising, but they're eerily similar.

In a lesson for today's would-be censors, the Comics Code ushered in an age of rather staid and dull comics[14] - as compared to the wildly experimental and challenging comics that had existed before. The trouble with censorship being that it is a blunt instrument that tends to take the 'good' out of the marketplace, along with the 'bad'.

Of course, an underground comics scene also blew up through the sixties and seventies, wilfully and deliberately setting out to scandalise and to break every single commercial taboo of the Comics Code – as though it were a hit list. This remained mostly underground, and an act of futile protest until the moral panic had passed – decades later. Still, there was resistance and a constant testing of the boundaries, even within commercial comics that signed up to the code.

Britain didn't have the code but barely had a home comics industry until later than the United States' golden age. Even so, a similar moral panic ended up killing off the rebellious and 'dangerous' comic Action but leading to the more acceptable science fiction comic 2000AD, which still pushed boundaries and exists to this day.

The Satanic Panic & BADD

The Satanic Panic was another moral panic that took true root - primarily in America - in the 1980s, before spreading internationally. It had started, as many of these panics do, with the publication of a book by Mike Warnke. This was a fantastical, tall-tale about having been involved in satanic cults and rituals that was entirely fabricated. Nonetheless, he was accepted as an expert on 'Satanism' and gained a lot of exposure on television and radio, picked up by evangelical Christians and conservative politicians to further their own agendas.

It didn't pick up steam, however, until the publication of another book 'Michelle Remembers' by Michelle Smith. This was another pack of horrible sounding lies, this time of ritual abuse that supposedly came out of repressed memories gathered by her psychiatrist – and later husband – Lawrence Pazder. As with Warke's book this was also given an enormous amount of credence by those who stood to benefit from it. This credence was completely out of step with the quality and amount of evidence for anything that was described in the book. There was no evidence. Whatsoever.

Soon, empowered by the interest in and promulgation of the idea by the Christian Right, along with the moral atmosphere of Reagan's America, people saw the influence of Satanism and the occult everywhere. They assumed the existence of a worldwide satanic conspiracy and saw its influence in everything from Ouija boards and tarot cards to games of Dungeons & Dragons and Heavy Metal music, even bar codes. Meanwhile, a genuine global conspiracy of child molesters, the Catholic Church, was getting away with murder.

The effect of this panic, for all the ideas behind it, were horseshit, was very real. As with the comic burnings under Wertham's influence, people burned books, games and albums. They destroyed their children's hobbies, ruined their childhoods and destroyed their friendships in the name of protecting them. Ironically, they also ended up making D&D and Heavy Metal much cooler and more attractive. All this fear gave them an 'edge' and got a lot of kids interested in the forbidden fruit that was 'the occult'.

The reverberations of the Satanic Panic continue to this day, with each new fad being condemned as the work of the devil by some pastor or other trying to get some media currency and publicity. It no longer has the grip that it once did and has, broadly, become an object of scorn. Everything from Harry Potter to Pokemon has been called Satanic, and the song and dance is losing its allure. It may seem hard to believe now, but there was a time when this could genuinely cause problems.

Of particular relevance to Gamergate is how The Satanic Panic played out in regards to role-playing games.

Dungeons & Dragons had already been a cause of some concern to particular groups of parents. Children and adults playing 'let's pretend' in such an intensive and structured way seemed to cause a worry that some that the players would lose the ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. There were also concerns raised after some suicides were blamed on D&D, particularly by Pat Pulling whose son had killed himself. Desperate for something, anything, to blame she latched onto D&D and spent years smearing and slandering the game and its players. She founded BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) to push her agenda, even producing materials for police forces relating to D&D and other role-playing games. In fact, studies showed that D&D players were better able to tell reality from fantasy and at a suicide rate of ~28 in ~3 million, were less likely to kill themselves than the average[15].

Did any of this matter?

TSR – who owned D&D at the time – engaged in some mild self-censorship (of nipples) and changed some of the terminology and world-building around their demon inspired monsters. The CARPGA (Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games) was set up as an advocacy and defence group. This didn't stop the book burnings and the bannings, the terrified parents doing the wrong thing. It made very little difference overall.

This whole set of events would leave a long scar on the psyche of the 'geekosphere' that is still felt to this day. This is like a 'race memory' of just how far this nonsense can go and how bad it can be both for business, and for the individual.

As a teenage metal-head and RPG fan, I was up to my neck in the Satanic Panic. I made pamphlets in English class to educate about what the games were. I wrote letters to newspapers when I heard about a role-playing club being banned from meeting in a school or scout hut. The internet wasn't a thing back then, but even so, I campaigned hard on behalf of my hobbies against those who wanted to censor and control them. How could I do any different today? Unfortunately, the response of many people who lived through the same panics I had, was to buy into the new moral panic. The very people who, of anyone, should know better ended up helping perpetuate and worsen the current situation. They were also some of the leading figures to demonise Gamergate, even as it fought for their rights as creators.

That was devastating.

The PMRC

In 1985 we had another moral panic, one that coincided and overlapped with some of the Satanic Panic. This one was to do with music. The PMRC (Parents' Music Resource Centre), co-founded by Tipper Gore, presaged that censorship would increasingly start to come from the left rather than the right by taking up a crusade against violent, drug-related or sexual music.

They believed – contrary to evidence, as with previous moral panics – that music, most especially Heavy Metal and, increasingly, rap music was a source of degeneracy, with an adverse effect on 'the youth'. To this end they agitated for a rating system for music, for sexual or other controversial album covers to be hidden, for radio stations to censor certain songs and for music to be labelled if it contained 'explicit lyrics'.

As with previous moral panics, the music industry put up a strong defence and made a few – largely meaningless – concessions to try and stave off full censorship. Artists as diverse as Dee Snyder, John Denver and Frank Zappa testified before the committee and made rousing defences of artistic free expression that were inspiring to see.

In the end, the PMRC made little change to anything, other than the adoption of the 'Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics' label which, in the end, probably sold more albums and made those slapped with the label richer. Nonetheless, the defence that artists and the music industry made of their creativity is noteworthy for later contrast with issues around Gamergate when games were attacked – in no small part – by its own, internal quislings.

The PMRC issue, of course, didn't much affect the UK directly. The discussion wasn't had here, and we'd already had many of the same debates in the Punk era. Our radio was already heavily redacted and censored. Heavy Metal did, however, come in for some – softened blowback. Metal, along with other things I was into (a casual interest in the occult and a love of role-playing games) were the subject of scaremongering by religious groups that came into schools. There was a video we were forced to watch in Religious Education class called 'Doorways to Danger' that went into great, panicked, detail over how terrible and Satanic all these things were. Fortunately, our RE teacher joined in our mockery and abuse of the poor guitar-wielding 'hip Christian' who presented this rubbish to us, and he was sent packing.

Jack Thompson

Jack Thompson is a disbarred attorney from Florida in the United States. He has a long history of riding the coattails of moral outrages from radio obscenity fines to rap music and finally, most famously, video games. He hit his stride in video games, coinciding with a growing moral panic about violence in games as they began to get more photo-realistic, three-dimensional and immersive. It can seem silly looking back at these older games, but the blood and gore of Mortal Kombat and the shift to the first-person view in games like DOOM were a sea-change – especially with the advent of widespread home consoles.

As with many of the previous moral panics, his concerns were over the 'dangers' to the youth. He called games such as Grand Theft Auto 'murder simulators' and took part in blaming them for violence and shootings, even suggesting that their 'mind-bending' properties could constitute a defence in court. These cases and Thompson's claims coincided with a series of high-profile school shootings such as The Columbine Massacre. Looking back now, many of his claims (such as that the Playstation 2's force feedback was psychological conditioning) [16] are ridiculous, but society was looking for something to blame, and games seemed to fit the bill. More importantly, having something to blame absolved parents, teachers, schoolmates and 'the system' of any responsibility.

As with other moral panics, the industry and its fans did not react well to attacks on their passion. Thompson became the subject of ridicule and found himself coded/patched/made into games where you could beat him up, kill him and otherwise 'burn him in effigy'. Interestingly, this passed largely without comment, unlike the 'Punch Anita' Flash game which was considered so terrible. There are also 'Punch Trump' games now that similarly pass without fuss.

Games were even created based on his peculiar ideas of what games were, or what the worst possible game could be. Industry and fans were united against him and – yet again – there was, and there remains, no evidence that games increase violent behaviour (if anything the opposite).

Despite this lack of scientific support games have been censored, and various degrees of state control or voluntary rating have been brought in. In the USA, since 1994, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board has applied ratings to games. While this doesn't seem to have stopped under-age kids playing games it does – at least in the USA – appear to have warded off the worst of the censorship. Other nations with less robust free speech laws have not fared as well, with Germany and Australia being particularly severe cases for game censorship.

It is worth pointing out – yet again – that in the instance of Thompson and the school shooting panic, the games industry and its fans were united in the face of that panic. They fought together, games media, fans and games companies – as one – to mock and challenge the threat. This wouldn't happen with Gamergate.

As with other panics, the fuss over violence in games only made them more appealing. I remember being desperate to play Mortal Kombat and to learn all the kill moves. Crude as they were, the fuss about them made doing so much more appealing and much more valuable. In the event of playing the game, it was a disappointment, but the challenge of finding someone who was allowed to have a copy – even at age 16 – added the thrill the game itself lacked. The Streisand Effect was a thing long before the Internet christened it in 2003.

The Porn Panic

Panic over pornography is nothing new; it's as old as pornography itself – at least in the modern sense. Even nations with enshrined free expression laws, such as the United States, have grappled with the issue. They have enacted laws and regulations (or tried to) that have interfered with the free production and consumption of adult material at both the state and federal level. In the United Kingdom, access to hardcore pornography was barely possible until the advent of (pirated) Satellite Television and then the Internet, back in the 1990s. The Internet made local restrictions impossible, pointless, like trying to stop beamed propaganda radio across the Iron Curtain.

Since then there has been an increasingly harsh push-back via various nefarious means. This has not only occurred in the USA via 'Operation Choke Point'[17] (an initiative intended to target grey/black market operations but increasingly used to target pornographers) but also in the UK via a most peculiar alliance. Radical feminism (in the form of sex-negative feminist Gail Dines) and traditionalist conservatism (in the shape of David Cameron and the UK Conservative Party) cooperated. Together they laid the groundwork for the Digital Economy Bill, which has already had massive impact on the small, and ironically female-led, UK porn industry. [18]

This has had a massively deleterious effect, especially on marginalised kink porn and feminist porn producers such as Pandora Blake. Agenda, apparently, overrides 'sisterhood' and repression overrides progress, at least if you happen to want the 'wrong' kind of liberalisation.

The tactics employed both sides of the Atlantic also amply demonstrate that the combinations and interactions of private and financial censorship and activist influence on government control can be almost as devastating as outright bans and government interference alone. Activists now wield an enormous amount of power, particularly in the private sphere, and often end up harming the very causes of diversity, feminism, etc. that they claim to champion. At least, they end up harming the 'wrong' kinds of diversity, feminism and progressivism from their point of view.

If you want to learn more about pornography, society and censorship issues I recommend 'Freakonomics', 'A Billion Wicked Thoughts' and 'Porn Panic – Sex and Censorship in the UK', for further reading.

A 'too much information' moment for you. I grew up before the porn-liberalisation that the Internet allowed. The Internet didn't became a 'proper' thing until 1995 when I was already twenty. Our sex education up until then primarily came from awkward school lessons or stumbling on someone's discarded softcore porn stash in the woods. People decry pornography as a place to learn about sex, but it is a damn sight better than the older alternatives.

I grew up kinky, without really understanding or realising what that was. There was no Internet, no way to connect to that community. This is, in some ways, much like I imagine growing up isolated as an LGBTalphabetsoup person must be, though not as serious. I grew up without the faintest idea that there was a whole BDSM community and very confused and self-loathing about the nature of my desires. It wasn't until being gifted a set of John Norman's Gor novels that I realised that this was a thing, that I wasn't some monster and that this was a 'thing'. The Internet, later, helped, but I never really got over that. I'm glad kids growing up today have, at least for the time being, a way to self-explore their sexuality and find communities to accept them, whatever they are.

The flipside of this, of course, is that people with genuinely horrific beliefs and practices can also form mutually supporting and reinforcing communities. Paedophiles, for example, often create rings and communities online that may worsen their behaviour and which has even led to something of a movement for 'paedophile acceptance' which is extremely worrying.

Youtube

As I am writing this there is a new moral panic, which I am – tangentially – caught up in. This one is an almost perfect example of the problems involved in:

- Irresponsible and unethical media.

- Commercial censorship.

- Moral panics.

All of which are relevant to, and a legacy of, Gamergate's concerns.

Youtube has been a fantastic platform for creators for many years. A relatively unfiltered, uncensored, meritocratic base upon which people could build careers and earn money for their commentary, art and alternative media. That seems to have – at least for now – to have somewhat come to an end. The gold-rush, at least, is over.

The Wall Street Journal started this panic. In the wake of the 2017 USA elections (in which alternative media and problems with mainstream media played a role) they wrote a series of articles decrying Youtube's monetization of 'extreme and hateful content'[19].

What happened, of course, is that a few minor videos and channels that were barely a blip had escaped Youtube's algorithms. As a result, they had been monetised while having 'sensitive' and non-PC content or titles, some of it legitimately hateful, much of it not. Adverts are also placed algorithmically, without human intervention, and have little or nothing to do with the content of any video they appear alongside (especially when it comes to mass market brands).

The media, however, starting with the Wall Street Journal – and including others – presented this as though Youtube and the advertisers involved were endorsing or funding hate speech and extremist views. In a knee-jerk response, many advertisers pulled their funding from Youtube sucking money out of the platform and causing Youtube – in turn – to make a panicked, knee-jerk response of their own.

Many Youtubers were doubly hit by this panic. The removal of a great deal of advertising revenue from the platform hit their income (by as much as ~95%). Then they were hit as Youtube's panicked doubling of control and censorship meant that many more of their videos – especially in terms of commentary on news and politics – were denied any advertising revenue at all. For people who had built this into a career and were creating content on Youtube full time, this was devastating.

With similar irony to that found in the feminist motivated censorship of pornography in the UK, these tightened constrictions hit liberal outlets hard. Channels like The David Pakman Show[20], which reported the news and right-wing views in order to criticise them. Even LGBT channels were hit, the panic allowing advertisers to dictate to the platform about anything 'socially uncomfortable. This went well beyond the demanded degree of censorship, but this is what always happens[21].

This attack, in itself, came in the wake of attacks on prominent Youtuber Pewdiepie (not the only target) over off-colour jokes and comedic and ironic references to Nazism in their videos. This, similarly, was an example of media irresponsibility and narrative framing to present the situation in a far different light to its actual nature[22].

Speaking for myself, I have a Youtube channel where I talk about many things, including political and social commentary. In the wake of these controversies, I have found that many more of my videos – especially about current affairs – have been demonetised and my advertising rate has declined. I doubled the size of my channel over the past year, my traffic is up proportionately, but my Youtube income has decreased slightly. Whenever I comment on something like the recent Islamist terror attacks in London they are inevitably demonetised and get a fraction of the hits that they would have before. This is hugely discouraging to many channels which, entirely respectfully, talk about and examine current affairs.

I think that's a dangerous discouragement to the provision of multiple sources and points of view and it continues to rip the guts out of alternative media and to force them to shift their business models in unpredictable ways.

The New Moral Panic

Gamergate itself is only one part of an extensive and ongoing moral panic that dates back at least to 2012 in some forms, and likely stretches back much further. It is reminiscent of the height of the previous Political Correctness overreach in the 1990s, which far outstripped sensible concerns and accommodations and began to interfere with language, expression and conduct before being rebuffed and defeated.

It's hard to describe this new moral panic efficiently and simply other than, perhaps 'Political Correctness Gone Mad' which, unfortunately, is something of a dismissive trope or meme when phrased that way. Perhaps another way to describe it would be the 'Curse of Intersectionality'. What its root appears to be, is that large numbers of well-meaning but unthinking people, empowered by social media, heads filled with peculiar and self-contradicting ideology have self-selected themselves to be the moral arbiters and censors of all culture. They demand an absolute adherence to an ever-shifting and never-satisfied moral purity in language, expression, politics, art, teaching and more. They form online (and increasingly offline) mobs to enforce this moral orthodoxy.

- They claim to be liberal, while being starkly (small 'c') conservative, especially around sex and art.

- They claim to be critics while being censors.

- They claim to be for free speech while shutting down and censoring speech and expression.

- They claim speech is violence, and that this is unacceptable - while using violence to shut down speech.

- They claim to be feminist while supporting genuinely patriarchal Islamic religion against criticism and invoking 'Islamophobia'.

- “Everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic and you have to point it all out.” - Anita Sarkeesian [23]

This phenomenon, these people, have come to be known as 'Social Justice Warriors', or – for the more academically inclined – The Regressive Left (which better describes the inherent hypocrisy of the position).

You could call this an 'intersectional moral panic'. It has remarkable endurance, and an almost amorphous quality, sharing many of the same actors, even as it strays from topic to topic.

I've been on the receiving end of it, and as such a victim of many of the things the Social Justice Warriors complain about or play themselves up as victims of. Threats of violence, blacklisting, dis-invitations, rape threats, hatemail, boycotts, hacking attempts. You name it.

Oh, but it's OK when they do it.

A Quick Side Note About Censorship

American readers may object to the usage of the term 'censorship' when referring to social censure or private companies controlling content. It's important to recognise that this is a rather parochial, insular, legalistic and narrow definition of the principle of free expression.

Anything that suppresses and controls speech or expression is censorship.

It doesn't have to be governmental.

The real question is whether you think such suppression is justified or excusable. Few of us would probably argue that photographic child pornography shouldn't be controlled or banned. Some of us may change our minds when it comes to 'lolicon' or 'shota' artwork (Japanese underage pornographic comics) which has been protected by the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund in the past. Our position will also be informed by the ages of consent in our home cultures. Different standards, different contexts, different lines drawn for censorship.

The public square is increasingly in private hands. It is controlled by a number of commercial choke-points regarding social media and sales points.

Amazon, for example, down lists and de-prioritises self-published works - especially erotica. This means that independent and smut authors have a hard time competing on an equal playing field. Producers of adult content also often find themselves paying premiums on payment processing and even being barred from services such as Paypal. This is a misuse of 'Operation Chokepoint' again.

It may be necessary, soon, to assert the human right to free expression over private companies, in the same way, that LGBT and racial minority rights have been asserted over bakers, bars, diners and cafes in the past. With that going to the Supreme Court in the USA soon, this may present a precedent for the extension of civil rights into the private sphere on a larger scale. I rather hope so.

For my part, I am fairly close to a free speech absolutist, so far as pragmatism allows. To my mind, the only valid excuse for censorship is if that expression meets the Harm Principle – something that's nearly impossible for mere speech. The Harm Principle, as formulated by J.S Mill is:

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

It shouldn't need clarifying, but it is [current year] so, unfortunately, we have to. When we talk about harm here, we're not talking about hurt feelings or feelings at all. What would meet the harm principle, regarding speech, would be direct calls for violence?

“I hate white people,” wouldn't meet it.

“Kill whitey,” would.

Context, of course, also plays a role. Things are excusable in comedy – for example – that aren't when said with sincerity and genuine intent.

Having been a – repeated – victim of private censorship has, no doubt, shaped my view and I do not claim, in any way, to be unbiased.

Occupy Wall Street

Perhaps the first huge sign that something was going wrong emerged during Occupy Wall Street. The factors that contributed to its collapse as a useful and meaningful movement are obvious in retrospect. What ha begun as an incredibly broad-based and unifying cause against corporate and moneyed influence on government ended up as a divided and sectarian laughing stock[25].

The problem then, as now – though for different reasons – was intersectionality.

“Intersectionality is a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another.”

- Geek Feminism Wiki

In theory that can sound like a good idea, after all, yes, these things can and do stack up. In practice, it tends to create a sprawling orthodoxy where the 'perfect is the enemy of the good', and where nobody can sufficiently agree on a singular cause to get anything done. Sometimes these aims even become contradictory.

It has also lead to a rather regressive inversion of the, presumed, normal social hierarchy. In this version priority is given to the most 'oppressed' and 'marginalised' person in the form of 'The Progressive Stack'. This is a form of 'oppression Olympics' that forces people to exaggerate and even fabricate their identities and forms of oppression so that they can speak at meetings and be taken seriously in a broader context. If you ever wondered why so many people seem to preface anything they say with a laundry list of race/gender/sexuality/mental illness etc., now you know why. They're seeking both permission to speak, and power from victimhood.

Intersectionality killed Occupy by dividing and subdividing that initial, broad-based, citizen uprising until all that was left were the true crazies. What was left was incapable of compromise and only the most 'pure' regarding 'Social Justice' credentials. A handful of the worst of the worst.

I best saw this explained on a Youtube video, closer to the time, that I have since been unable to re-find.

Imagine a whiteboard, clean and pristine, gleaming white.

Now picture drawing a circle on that board – as large as it will allow – and label this one 'money in politics'. That's about as large and inclusive as Occupy ever got to be, everyone who agreed on that singular issue. That took in many conservatives, a tonne of libertarians, masses of socialists and many ordinary folks concerned with the way politics was going.

Now draw a slightly smaller circle, barely any smaller and label that 'corporate personhood'. Most people still agreed on that, but you might have lost a few of the more extreme libertarians and Rand-fans who were concerned by corporatism but who saw 'money as speech' as fine.

Now draw a more significantly small circle within that one, down and to the right a little. Label that one 'wealth inequality'. You're probably losing more of the capitalism fans by this point, a lot of the libertarians too and a lot of regular folks, no matter how good the arguments might be.

Now another, smaller circle within the last one, mark that 'wealth redistribution'. This occurs already of course, but many people associate it with 'socialism', Communism and other associated terms have negative connotations, especially in the USA, wildly beyond what they deserve – but there you go.

You can already see how the size of the movement is shrinking away, and this is just sticking to directly related issues. Try drawing a much smaller circle and label this one 'rape culture'. This is an unrelated, radical feminist narrative that the remaining, somewhat reasonable, people are unlikely to go along with as a concept.

What about 'forgiving all debt', a rather extreme demand? What about asking for a racial/gender equality amendment (unnecessary as said rights are already guaranteed)? How many people from that original big circle are going to be left at this point? How many people are going to agree with everything in all those circles?

Occupy showed how the left could eat itself, alienate liberals who could otherwise agree with many of the professed aims and it showed just how harmful pseudo-left, pseudo-academic discourse and weird identity politics could be to genuine causes. Many of Occupy's concerns and practices were so extreme, so unrelated, so obscure, so laughable that they harmed the central movement. We saw a shift though, and mere ridiculousness wouldn't be enough to disarm this kind of thing for long.

Atheism Plus

An immediate precursor to Gamergate and sharing many factors with it, Atheism Plus was an attempt to stage a 'coup' of sorts within the New Atheism movement. This was a split that was, in many ways, between the 'sceptic atheists' – rooted in a tradition of science and scepticism - and the 'political atheists'. That second group's reasoning appeared to come more from opposition to the Christian Right on an ideological level, rather than a basis of logic, reason and commitment to the intellectual pursuit of truth.

Supposedly it was about atheism plus dealing with a bunch of other things. Initially proposed by blogger Jen McCreight, it suggested that atheist activism should also apply itself to feminism, social justice, racism, homophobia and so forth. Unfortunately, it forgot to implement the foundational scepticism and critical thinking inherent to much of the New Atheist movement to its sacred cows. As leading figures like Rebecca Watson, PZ Myers and more embraced it and began making intellectually weak 'Social Justice' arguments and attacking fellow sceptics those professed beliefs came under scrutiny. They were weighed, measured and found wanting. The Atheism Plus people found their ideas being considered with the same attention to detail that atheists and sceptics had previously turned on religious beliefs, pseudoscience and alternative medicine.

They didn't like it much.

Social Science is barely science in the minds of many. Its relative lack of rigour, its lack of reproducibility [26], its vulnerability to hoaxes [27][28] and its hostility to peer review [29] make it a joke amongst those involved in the hard sciences. All of this is doubly true for Gender Studies and similar 'disciplines' that wear their biases on their sleeve.

This isn't to say that all Social Science is garbage, but it does appear to be deeply compromised and infected with ideological bias and postmodernism. Little wonder that people who weren't impressed by the Creation Institute have not been impressed by the pseudo-scientific end of these disciplines, even when they've been embraced by people who called themselves sceptics, albeit selective ones.

Of course, that scepticism, that questioning, has, in turn, caused the other side to double down, to accuse any who disagree of misogyny, racism or whatever other 'accusation du jour' seems apposite. This has created an enormous fracture within that sceptic/atheist community which will likely never be healed.

Much of what happened in Gamergate is similar. People sceptical of the sexism/racism and 'mind control' claims made of video games were accused of all manner of horrible things simply for asking for evidence. It's also similar in that with both Atheism Plus and Gamergate, the problems started with people from within, rather than without. A break in the tradition of most moral panics which are usually attacks by external enemies.

I have been an atheist since I was old enough to realise that Father Christmas wasn't a real thing and I was able to draw the obvious parallel between the one and the other. The sceptic and atheist communities had been as much of a haven as gaming for me, a place to meet like-minded people and to continually learn.

To see this fringe group of crazy people, operating as much on faith as any religion, break up what had been a consistent and growing movement since 2001 was, frankly, heartbreaking. It made me a hell of a lot more cynical and suspicious of people's motives in a way that I doubt will ever change back.

Anita Sarkeesian

Any discussion of the lead-up to Gamergate that doesn't mention Anita Sarkeesian would be incomplete. In many ways, she, and her fêting by the games media set the fertile ground from which Gamergate would sprout.

Sarkeesian began her Feminist Frequency project in 2009, a feminist critique of popular media of various kinds. It wasn't too popular and came in for a little criticism and counter-accusations against that criticism but failed to get any real traction until she put video games in her sights.

In 2012 she launched a Kickstarter campaign for her series 'Tropes Versus Women in Video Games' which received an enormous amount of media attention, especially from the desperately virtue-signalling games media. Gamers themselves were, however, not impressed. Alarm bells of a Jack Thompsonesque nature were ringing. Many of the kinds of claims she appeared to be making about the alleged sexism, racism, etc. of games didn't ring true. She seemed to have a profound ignorance of the history of games, their audiences or the lore she was criticising.

These counter-criticisms – along with some inevitable trolling – were characterised as 'misogynistic' abuse and also given enormous media exposure, priming the pump for gamer resentment towards their news outlets and distrust of the narratives that they presented. Off the back of this victim-based publicity the Kickstarter was massively oversubscribed and yet, despite that, the series only just finished in 2017, many years late and short of its original aims.

The production of Tropes Vs Women in Video Games caused a lot of gamers to start digging away, trying to figure out what was going on. Especially as the project ran behind, and episode after episode betrayed a near-total ignorance of the source material as well as writing her enormous ideological bias so large it could be seen from space.

In relatively short order links were found between Sarkeesian and dubious internet marketing scams[30]. She was exposed as lying about her 'gamer' cred [31]. She was found to be stealing art and footage[32][33], and she was found to be misrepresenting what was happening in the games she critiqued[34]. None of this seemed to have any impact on her credibility in feminist or media circles, but it was a death blow so far as gamers were concerned. They began to become more and more confused and betrayed by the fact that the games media, and some companies, were giving this obvious-seeming fraud the time of day.

Despite this, few game media outlets took any of this seriously. Instead, they decided to focus on the harassment narrative. There's little doubt that Sarkeesian did receive some harassment, but in the immortal words of Tyler the Creator:

“Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Cyber Bullying Real Hahahaha Nigga Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Nigga Close Your Eyes Haha”

- Tyler the Creator on Twitter, retweeted and liked well over 300,000 times.

There was a bigger problem than some blockable trolls attacking someone who had advertised their vulnerabilities. That problem was that the genuine criticism and warnings about her ended up being treated as though they were harassment.

Any critique of Sarkeesian, or her later imitators, was met with accusations of misogyny, harassment, bullying and so forth. Intentionally or not, Sarkeesian had also proven the financial viability of a new form of business – monetised victimhood.

I had initially thought Sarkeesian was a slightly dishonest critic, shifting things to suit her agenda. Her total unwillingness to discuss, debate or address any questions has hardened my attitude towards her though. Her use of spurious abuse to advocate for Internet censorship is dangerous, whether it's ignorant or not, and she fits into a long tradition of 'critics' seeking to control subcultural media.

This was compounded for me recently when she was present at a Youtube oriented convention called 'Vidcon'. While there she was on two panels. From the first she abused one of her critics who was sitting in the audience, in the second she attacked and abused a Youtuber by the name of Boogie2988, one of the loveliest people in the online-famous space and a genuine victim of real, and horrific, harassment himself. Any lingering sympathy or understanding for Sarkeesian I might have had vanished over that weekend. Especially with other, similar, feminist and 'SocJus' online personalities finally reaching out to discuss and debate.

Side Note: Synergistic Trolling

Anyone who has spent any amount of time on the Internet knows that the standard wisdom when being trolled or anonymously harassed is to ignore it:

'Don't feed the trolls'.

This is, and remains, sound advice. It's the only way to retain a free internet and to deal with its more noxious elements effectively. Some threats and actions are, of course, more serious and deserve to be taken seriously. The posting of Navy Seal memes[35] and anonymous threats of various kinds are, however, safe to ignore and are usually blatantly, obviously trolling.

Despite this, some people continue to take them seriously, despite them being obviously spurious within an instant or so to anyone with a modicum of Internet experience. This rather requires us to ask 'why?'

In my estimation, from what I've observed, this is a phenomenon that I call 'synergistic trolling'.

What this means is that where 'don't feed the troll' generally works, it assumes that the victim of the trolling finds the attacks annoying and wants to break the cycle. Trolls desire feedback and infamy, denying them attention and exposure prevents them from getting the pleasure that they seek. Where this goes wrong is where the person being trolled is also served and validated by the trolling.

This has been particularly visible from feminist blogs and articles. They often post rather petty 'bait' articles about things like 'manspreading' or beating up their boyfriends. This, in turn, attracts a reaction from trolls and critics, who then get conflated and used to fuel the harassment and sexism narrative.

The troll gets the reaction and publicity they want; the trollee gets the reaction and publicity (and money) they want. Everyone is a 'winner', and yet, at the same time, everyone is a loser, since taking trolling seriously fuels censorship and control demands over the Internet.

Perhaps the starkest embodiment of this abject stupidity is Lewis' law:

“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”

- Helen Lewis, New Statesman/Guardian etc. Stated on Twitter.

The tautological, circular nature of this statement should be obvious. It can be applied to any extreme and ideological position that causes a reaction.

“The comments on any article about white supremacy justify white supremacy,” for example.

It's worthless, meaningless, not even slightly intelligent, but it does indicate how fishing for a reaction can be rewarding for the targeted party.

Genuine critics, such as myself, are left in something of a bind. Do we leave the bait alone and, thereby, leave it unchallenged, to be taken as true? Do we take the bait and take it apart, knowing we'll be conflated with the inevitable trolls and be ignored and have our reputations trashed? There's no way to 'win'.

'Entitled' Gamers

Gamers are demanding, with little tolerance for bullshit. Games are expensive. The hype around games promises a lot, and if a game fails to deliver on its promises woe betide the developer who lets down their audience.

There had been rumblings about 'entitled gamers'[36] for some time, and a similar harassment narrative as that found around female and minority critics (no matter how shitty they were as people). It blew up over the ending of Mass Effect 3[37].

Gamers adored Mass Effect. It was a sprawling science fiction epic that had the whole galaxy in peril. It had engaging characters, a 1970s/80s NASA-art aesthetic and an involving storyline so good that people forgave many of its gameplay quirks and variations. It was much more consistent than Dragon Age – it's fantasy counterpart – and its fans became emotionally invested.

The big buy-in came about because this was a game in which your decisions were supposed to matter. Your progress saves from game one would carry over into game two and on into game three. They would inform the way interactions unfurled and the way the conflicts and nature of the galaxy were presented. All of this promised that every decision you made would accumulate from game to game all the way through to the climax at the very end. Every person you saved, every critical decision you made would all result in a personalised and meaningful outcome.

When Mass Effect 3 dropped, the climax to the series, the fans were pumped, engaged, ready for the payoff from years of game playing and speculation. People were rabidly enthusiastic to get to that long-promised ending.

It was a damp squib.

Everything you had done boiled down to a couple of seconds here or there in a pre-rendered cutscene. No matter what you had done, your final decision came down to walking through one of three doors, completely unaffected by three games of obsessive play, weighing every single action and treating it as though it had consequence.

Gamers were pissed.

They had sunk around $200 or so – including downloadable content – into the series, had been promised the Moon on a stick and had been delivered a simple trinary choice, in which all that investment was completely irrelevant. In that instance, I think the reaction was more than justified. If you paid $200 for a meal and were promised a Michelin Star lemon sorbet for dessert, only to be served a tiny sliver of stale coffee cake, I think you'd be rightly angry. We would not call such a diner 'entitled' for demanding what they were promised, especially at that price.

Still, this – in 2012 – was a part of the media souring on the 'hardcore gamer' who had been their bread and butter for years. It fed into swelling gamer resentment and suspicion of their fan-media. These were the outlets that should have – at least broadly – shared their view. These were the outlets that were supposed to be their consumer champions. Instead, they were attacking their audience – this was the shape of things to come.

#CancelColbert

In March of 2014, a scant few months before Gamergate would start, there was another key, precursor event. This was probably the last time people would openly laugh and scorn the absurdity of 'Social Justice' before it seemed to become something more serious and dangerous.

Stephen Colbert did a skit, on his show, making fun of the desperate and sad efforts of the Washington Redskins to counter the – arguably – racist connotations of their name. In the skit he lampooned this with the following:

“I am willing to show the Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”

To any sane or rational person, it was evident that this was using and subverting the language of racism (towards Asian peoples) to satirise the attitudes and actions of the management of the Washington Redskins.

To self-styled activist Suey Park though, this was - in and of itself - inexcusable racism. She took to Twitter, as such people are wont to do, to whip up a mob.

“#CancelColbert because white liberals are just as complicit in making Asian Americans into punchlines and we aren’t amused. ” - Suey Park (@suey_park) March 27, 2014

Reaction to this was mixed, rather than the unified front, we would later come to expect from progressive outlets. Some backed Suey Park, some backed Colbert. Colbert's liberal credentials were unimpeachable which helped him. Most people understood the point of the joke. Calling a satire on blundering racism, racist was obvious enough that many were left scratching their heads at what all the fuss was about.

What made Suey Park a figure of Internet fun, however, was her car-crash interview with Josh Zepp on the Huffington Post. She was evasive, racist towards the host, and crashed out of the interview with the immortal catchphrase:

“...I don't think I'm going to enact the labour of having to explain to you why that's incredibly offensive.”

Because if there's one thing activists shouldn't be doing, it's trying to explain to people why they're upset or what the problem is. They're just supposed to know magically. Somehow.

Suey became a figure of fun for a short while, occasionally resurfacing, briefly, before fading into relative obscurity. Still, she established a brand of humourlessness and hypersensitivity that would characterise the Social Justice Warriors in the coming conflicts.

Women in Tech

Gamergate emerged in the middle of a set of ongoing discussions around feminism, women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and the supposedly hostile and anti-women atmosphere found in tech industries. There are endless arguments back and forth over whether there is a pay gap[39] and to what degree nature and nurture play a part in career choice [40]. The blame has, mostly, been put squarely on a presumptively misogynistic tech industry. Considerable efforts have been made at great cost to get more women into STEM degrees and fields, but with little overall success – whatever you think the reason might be.

That a male-dominated industry tends to have a male dominated culture seems to a) surprise people and b) shock them. Why is impossible to discern. Why the same observations are not made about feminised, female-oriented workplaces is also impossible to discern. There have been endless stories about addressing this 'issue', finding things to blame and telling women how sexist these industries are - because apparently, that will encourage them to join those industries.

There's a narrative being pushed, and the truth of the matter be damned. This type of story is repeated over and over, not only on sites like Jezebel, with an overtly feminist agenda, but in otherwise creditable news outlets such as The Guardian. This atmosphere already existed, with anecdotal tales of harassment and sexism, long before Gamergate was a dot on the horizon.

For the most part, like a lot of supposedly sexist issues, this seems to just come down to personal choice. For whatever reason men and women – as broad demographics – appear to choose different kinds of career. This holds true – and even is expressed more strongly – in nations with high, measured levels of gender equality. Nobody should be held back from going into whatever career they want, but equally they shouldn't be forced to go into a career they have no interest in. This goes for both men and women.

Online Bullying/Harassment

Another strand that has been a constant, background hum before, during and after Gamergate has been the intimidation and harassment narrative. This has been interpreted as a female problem, despite ample evidence from many sources, including anti-bullying charities, demonstrating that men are the majority of victims of online harassment [41][42].

What seems to differ are the reactions of women to being harassed, the kind of harassment that they get and the reaction that we, as a society have when women are harassed. In practice, this amounts to a sexist double-standard, one which has been explored in various studies. As one example, it turns out that removing benevolent sexism is seen as sexist[43]. It seems the more effort you put into treating women and other minorities equally; the more bigoted people will think you are.

All rather self-defeating.

There are other strange aspects to the way this is reported on. There tends to be a conflation of issues such as considering stalking to be online harassment, rather than its own thing. Many treat harmless online smack-talk with the same gravity as genuine cyberbullying. Many of the biggest victims of trolling are archly feminist article writers for online news outlets, who all but advertise their buttons and invite trolls to push them – then make hay from being trolled. 'Harassment' then becomes a concern for female column writers who then write more about it, inviting more trolls and so on, into a vicious cycle.

Mere disagreement – particularly with someone from a 'protected class' becomes spun and rebranded as harassment to avoid criticism[44]. Even pointing out someone's genuinely wrong actions can sometimes be brushed aside if a harassment narrative can be created around them, protecting them from fallout from their bad behaviour.

It seems suspicious that governments are latching onto these arguments and using them to make a case for more controls and less anonymity online. Even though trolls, when unmasked, most often turn out to be harmless, pathetic[45] and their threats less than credible. The knock on effect to political and religious dissidents, domestic abuse victims, LGBT youth and so on from the loss of Internet anonymity and freedom would be terrifying, even deadly. These consequences have already happened to some degree via Facebook and Google Plus' 'real names' policies.

Ignorable – but nasty – trolling may very well be the price that we have to pay for some of the good things the Internet gives us. We must be free to disagree – even with vitriol – without being arrested over our disagreements[46].

I know, personally, all ends of trolling and online abuse. Being a 'cishetwhitemale' didn't insulate me. Indeed it made me more of a target. I was targeted for advocating against censorship and for creative freedom. Many of the people who have attacked me haven't been ignorable, anonymous trolls but individuals with names, faces and audiences. Even Wil Wheaton.

There is a marked and discernible difference between anonymous trolls fishing for a reaction and genuine abuse from people in positions of power. As a victim myself I'm sick of people trying to make political mileage by misrepresenting what has happened to them. It needs to stop.

Existing Corruption Issues

Games media has long had a problem with corruption and ethical issues. Gamergate was just – perhaps – one of the more visible explosions of these issues, but they've been around in the background for many years.

Going back to the early days of video games journalism, games magazines (such as Nintendo Power) were owned and operated by games companies themselves. This was, of course, fairly obvious. What you read in those magazines could be taken with a grain of salt, in the up-front knowledge that it would be hideously biased. The industry was also smaller at that time, and the corruption had less of consequence. Things were not, yet, as serious. In many ways this corruption was simply taken as being part of the lay of the land, people were used to it, grumbled, but put up with it, forewarned and forearmed against it.

Things began to get more serious as the games industry began to explode in popularity and worth. Games reviews began to shift online and to an advertising, rather than a subscription/sales, revenue model. This has given advertisers and sponsors an enormous amount of power over games media outlets through their direct or indirect sponsorship.

Another aspect of this is that these outlets rely on access to games to write their stories, get clicks and – hence – advertising revenue. To get early access, to get early release copies of games (to make reviews and guides and so on) they need to maintain a good relationship with the game studios. Bad reviews risk losing revenue and access. This is part of the reason why an 'average' score for a game is seven out of ten, rather than five.

I've personally seen this happen. A friend of mine used to review MMORPGs for a website. When they gave a particular game a poor review they received a lot of push-back from their editor, a near-refusal to publish it, an enormous amount of attention and pressure from the studio involved and a lot more. In the end, they relented and upped the score a little, but it left a bad taste in their mouth, and they stopped working for the site shortly after.

A higher profile example of the same problem came with 'Gerstmanngate' [47]. In this instance, a writer for Gamespot gave the game Kane & Lynch a poor review (a 6, which in any sane world would be considered above average). The problem was that Kane & Lynch was being advertised heavily on the site at the time, so the 'poor' review looked bad.

As a result, Gerstmann was fired, and it took five years for the other details to come out, including suggestions that other companies were applying similar financial pressure to games review sites. Interestingly, many game sites that have run stories on this and how bad it is, were happy to gloss over or ignore the issues around Gamergate. Also interestingly Gamergate have supported studio boycotts of media outlets they felt betrayed by. A genuine example, perhaps, of a double standard. If understandable.

These problems and Gamergate have led a lot of gamers to an exodus away from the larger games sites, seeking out those who promise a more ethical and honest approach. This also drove a lot of people to Youtubers, who were more separated from games advertisers. As Youtube became more popular, the same corruption issues began to appear there[48]. With Youtube's old advertising model being undermined and Youtubers needing to look elsewhere for revenue, this is only likely to get worse and smaller websites have a hard time becoming self-sufficient too.

The Indie Scene

Corruptions and grubbiness was the status quo when it came to big games companies and the media, but there was a new movement of independent and small-scale games production that promised to be something different.

To start with 'Indie' just meant 'Independent'. This was down to small companies and individual game creators selling their material online themselves or via Steam and other marketplaces. Many also gave their games away for free. This was possibly the biggest and most exciting change in games development since the 'bedroom programmer' era of the ZX Spectrum and C64 or the shareware and demo scene of the 16-bit era.

Inevitably the Indie games scene began to become political, just as independent publishing and music had. Rather than meaning 'independent', Indie started to mean progressive or 'right on', sometimes to an absurd degree[49]. The games media, populated with frustrated people who wanted to be 'real writers' and wanted what they did to mean something, this was a godsend. Suddenly games sites were flush with politicised game reporting, and this began to bleed into reviews of mainstream games. Suddenly points were being lost for 'sexualised design'[50] or failure to include minorities. Gamers, who mainly didn't care, or at least didn't think this was the most important thing, were left asking an important question:

“Yeah, OK, but is the game any good?”

Indie games were being treated like the second coming; their creators were being held up as moral paragons. All the while more and more coverage was being given to 'non-games'[51]. Regular games were, at the same time, being judged on increasingly esoteric and politicised standards. Any challenge or question to this emerging order was, of course, dismissed as bigotry. Gamers began to build up a steam of resentment and annoyance at being talked down to, told off, judged and not being told what they needed to know.

Whether the game was any good or not.

I like the experimental edge one finds in true indie games, whether that be computer games or tabletop games. I, however, loathe the politicisation and the way promoting many of these games seems to come down to spitting on the things that other people love. Being independent should mean just that, not exchanging a set of commercial restrictions for an even harsher set of political demands. The point of being Indie should be just that, to be independent and free.

Pseudo-Academia

We've talked earlier about how social science is barely worthy of the name science, its issues with peer review, reproducibility and so forth. To quote Peter Bishop: “It's not even science!” How, then, would it get its fingers into games culture? Many of these pseudo-academics don't appear to be gamers or involved in game culture in any meaningful way, yet they make pronouncements and are parroted by the games media. How and why? Those that are gamers don't seem to be being objective and appear to be involved only so far as they want to wreck everything that exists. Not to make anything new.

Games still aren't a particularly prestigious arena to study, but as money in the games industry increases and its social importance increases it has become more attractive to academics. They appear to be trying to subject games to the same kinds of examination they have with other cultural artefacts using postmodernism and critical theory[52]. This has had questionable value in other areas where it has been applied, but the uniquely interactive nature of games makes it even more worthless than usual. Further, it is not only a method and means to supposedly examine and understand society and media but to actively try and change it.

It's an invitation to meddle, to mess, to destroy. To try and censor and control creative people.

Pseudo-academic groups like DiGRA[53] drive a lot of this absurdity. They produce mountains of mostly spurious analysis and navel gazing that is either impenetrably opaque, breathtakingly absurd or manifestly ill-informed to all but the most casual gamers. Nonetheless, it provides article fodder for games media sites, and many of the humanities and journalism graduates now working as games journalists have been through similar propaganda mills. Unsurprisingly they come out with similar ideas and a similar impetus to change the world. Perhaps they resent that they've ended up writing about Mario and console themselves (no pun intended) that they can make the world a better place by writing a feminist perspective on Princess Peach. Their audience couldn't give a tuppeny toss about the 'cisnormative heteropatriarchal coding found within Streetfighter and its implications with regard to the female-identified interpretation of Asian-American history' and laugh at anyone who does. Their audience, however, seems to be their peers, not their customers.

This pseudo-academia does lend a thin veneer of respectability to the people who apparently want to destroy the things they're supposed to be reporting on and causes the mainstream media to take their assertions seriously. They don't know any better.

Let's be clear here, however, this isn't anti-intellectualism. If anything it is the opposite. Most gamers have great respect for science and technology, but the reasons social sciences are seen as second (or third) class by other fields are also the reasons many gamers don't take social sciences seriously. It is their intellectual failings, their lack of adherence to proper method and objectivity that fuels objections. Not inverse snobbery.

Gamergate's Place in this Narrative

So where does Gamergate fit into all this?

I've gone to great pains to explain the history of the persecution and misunderstanding of subcultural media to show that this is nothing new. Gamergate is part of a long tradition of these subcultures fighting back with humour, counter-narratives and ironic adoption of the insults hurled at them[54].

Geek media, subcultural media, has a justified siege mentality. Video games, in particular, have constantly been under assault over one thing or another since the 1970s and 80s[55]. These attacks have been consistent, whether it's about addiction, violence, Satanism or – in the latest incarnation of the panic – sexism, racism, diversity and representation. Gamers have been used to it, have fought back against it each time and it is that, coupled with the 'holier than thou' turning out to have feet of clay, that made Gamergate erupt so forcefully and viciously. You have to understand the context to understand the outrage and vehemence.

Properly understood, Gamergate was a community coming together to defend their hobby and art form. It was a protest against creeping corruption and nepotism in a business that only gets bigger, grander and more ambitious year by year. Some will dismiss games, still, as childish - but as a business, it now makes twice as much as the movie industry's box office receipts and has since 2013[56].

Games have been attacked nearly since their inception.

Games are big business.

Games are art.

People are passionate about their games.

None of this should be surprising.

What's Different About Gamergate

While Gamergate fits into this continuum of moral panics and communities coming together against interlopers and attackers, there is something different about the situation around Gamergate. This also applies to the newer moral panics affecting tabletop games, nerd movies, comics and other 'geek media'.

In previous panics, the judgements and problems came from outside. There were agenda-driven campaigners, people who knew nothing about the mediums involved. There were glory-seeking pseudo-scientists, people driven by personal tragedy, governments seeking more control, moral busybodies and religious groups looking to impose their beliefs and demonise the 'other'.

This time the attacks have come from within.

Where with the violence issues and Jack Thompson the industry, games media and fans came together to reject the attacks in an almost entirely united front, this time people are divided. The attacks are coming from the hobby's media outlets and websites. There are people embedded within companies trying to force these agendas of censorship and diversity box-ticking exercises. There are regionalisation 'experts' failing to do their jobs and instead injecting their politics into the material they're entrusted with. The games media itself is either metaphorically in bed with and corrupted by large games companies, or literally in bed and corrupted by Indie games companies.

Where previous battles were against invading outsiders, Gamergate – and other more recent wrangles in other nerd media – are civil wars, and all the more bitter for it.

This is the part that has been so personally devastating to me with regard to Gamergate, perhaps even more so than all the people credulously, and without the slightest thought, buying into the harassment and misogyny narratives.

I'm a creator, an author, a game designer. I work with artists, writers, editors, designers, people at all levels of the creative process. In the past, I've seen them come together to tell censors and authoritarians to piss off. I've seen them fight to defend their art from interference and the art of others from interference – even things they hated or disagreed with.

This time though?

This time there's buy-in from people in the creative community, and they have used their influence and power to marginalise people they don't like or agree with. Accusations have been hurled, boycotts supported, whole groups of people have been banned for fora or put on block or blacklists. For what? Entirely subjective interpretations of what constitutes some transgression of a mercurial set of standards, which are rooted in postmodern relativity anyway, and as insubstantial as shifting sand.

I had, perhaps foolishly, thought that – based on past behaviour – creative communities shared my devotion to free expression. Discovering that this had changed was genuinely, shatteringly depressing.

Chapter Four: Franz Ferdinand

Ask someone who was part of Gamergate what it was about and you'll almost certainly hear about ethics in games journalism and censorship issues. If you ask someone against it, or uninvolved, and you'll likely hear something about harassment, trolling, cyberbullying and possibly some waffle about the alt-right or Trump. If you hear anything about ethics or censorship from those people, it will be in scornful and dismissive tones as though this was never what it was about. Slightly more sophisticated critics will likely describe an – entirely spurious but compelling – scenario about 'white cishetmale rejection of women and minorities invading their hobby'.

So how is it that we have this enormous gulf between how Gamergate sees itself, how it is perceived by its enemies and how it has been portrayed in the mainstream and games media?

If it is this repressive, regressive, reactionary, right-wing movement – how is it that its members are so diverse and primarily left-liberal in political standing? If it is this alt-right, Trumpist, troll-nest, how is it that I – a left-anarchist, militant egalitarian and anti-censorship activist would be involved with it?

To understand that gap in perception you don't only have to know the background of moral panics and the Zeitgeist in which Gamergate took place, you have to understand how Gamergate started. For that reason, it's important to talk about Zoe Quinn, Depression Quest, Eron Gjoni and the Zoe Post. Even though none of these things mean that much in and of themselves when it comes to Gamergate.

Underlining that last point is important; Gamergate was not about Zoe Quinn, nor limited to Zoe Quinn. Gamergate's detractors often try to make it all about the 'harassment' of women, and about Zoe Quinn in particular, ignoring the broader historical and contemporaneous issues. Quinn's shenanigans and the fuss around them was only the starting point.

Zoe Quinn & Depression Quest

Zoe Quinn is a kinda-sorta Indie game developer. The main reason for which she is known, besides being a 'victim' of Gamergate, is her game Depression Quest.

Depression Quest is nothing special. It's a text game that is supposed to, in some ways, replicate the experiences involved in being depressed. This is meant to be to help foster understanding and to educate people on those issues – which is a step up from 'I don't have to educate you, shitlord'.

Apparently, she had some previous history, some things that had gone on before that which earned some ire, but it is through Depression Quest that Quinn became visible, known and began to attract serious dislike from gamers.

You see, Depression Quest isn't a game. It's less of a game than something like Oregon Trail, even though both are educational. It's also merely a text game, with very limited inputs (I've tried my hand at this and made a 'game' in an afternoon[57]). Depression Quest began to get attention and plaudits well before Gamergate became a thing. This was done, arguably, at the expense of projects that were more genuinely games – as gamers understand it – and were more complex, more accomplished and more deserving.

My Previous Support

I used to be a supporter and booster of Zoe Quinn. As late as August in 2014 – when things were starting to go south around her – I was suspicious of the accusations and somewhat supportive[58]. As a depressive, I had welcomed the significant profile of Depression Quest in creating conversations about depression. While flawed, the game was useful in trying to get friends and family to understand what depression was like for me. It helped them empathise with what I was going through and why I got so withdrawn. I was grateful and unaware of the controversy that was already around her.

When Quinn was mugged at the beginning of 2014, I donated to help her out[59]. When she got trolled and attacked pre-Gamergate, I offered some words of support. I let her know Depression Quest had helped me in getting people to understand. It wasn't until her scandals began to hit that I questioned my support and whether I had been acting on behalf of a good person or not.

It turned out, she wasn't much of a good person. I'd been fooled.

Zoe's Bad Actions

I wish I could just skip over Quinn and all her dealings, as she is only the spark that set off a chain of events that culminated in Gamergate. It is important, however, in my estimation to establish that she is not some passive victim and that her scandals and the reactions to them did not come out of nowhere.

I was not even familiar with much of this until things began to snowball, and uncovering all these things established a more compelling picture of a pattern of behaviour. Quinn's dishonesty and manipulation appears to have a rather long history.

Wizardchan

While trying to get Depression Quest onto Steam (a download service) Quinn came in for a lot of stick, trolling and downvoting (you need to have some level of approval to be allowed onto the platform). At the height of this process, she claimed to be getting harassment on her phone, and elsewhere, of a more serious nature. She chose to blame an image board called 'Wizardchan', inhabited – almost entirely – by socially anxious, virginal men. There were precisely two posts on that board mentioning her, which while rather nasty, made no call for brigading and were rather just discussing the game[60].

There was no evidence of any brigading, no evidence it started on Wizardchan, but this site ended up getting a lot of attention and harassment in turn. Given the mentally damaged and desperate nature of many of the posters there, this was probably far more impactful than the trolling Quinn had received. On the back of that trolling and high profile support from key figures in the burgeoning 'social justice' gaming community, Depression Quest was greenlit and went up onto Steam. Despite being, essentially, a little web-page based text-clicking game.

Now, it's important to note that I'm not saying that there was a conspiracy here. All I think there is, is irresponsibility, hypocrisy, and the establishment and continuation of a pattern of behaviour. We can see, here, the value and power of being a victim. We can also see the willingness of people to believe a harassment narrative – so long as it comes from a woman - without evidence. We can also see how the negative image of a group, such as Wizardchan, renders them villains, even when they're the ones being attacked and the ones who are vulnerable.

Helldump

Quinn was an active participant in a board on the site 'SomethingAwful' called 'Helldump'[61]. This was a board dedicated to trolling, doxxing and online harassment. Supposedly they (the board, rather than Quinn individually) had a 'confirmed kill'. That is to say; it's claimed and supposed that they had succeeded in harassing someone to the point of suicide.

There have been numerous attempts to minimise and excuse this, to misrepresent what Helldump was, but Gamergate members were attacked and excoriated for far less, so there's at the very least a problem of consistency. She does appear to have been active under the name 'Eris'. She confessed to being a part of it and, even if it doesn't amount to much, she was at least implicitly guilty of doing all the things she would later condemn.

The Fine Young Capitalists

The Fine Young Capitalists were (are) a somewhat radical feminist group determined to support women in gaming and to get more women into gaming as a whole. To that end, they organised various events including a game jam, intended to highlight and assist female developers in gaining skills and experience[62]. They ended up entangled with Quinn after someone mistakenly took them for being transphobic, quite how you set a line and police someone's genuine female or trans-female status I do not know. Quinn's circle – and Quinn herself – took to trying to sabotage their project by that misunderstanding.

According to TFYC themselves, they had immense trouble getting publicity and backing due to sabotage by Quinn and her friends. Outlets, sites and individuals had been warned away; horrible things had been said about them, their site was taken down by an attack. They tried to counter things as best they could, but it seemed they were tainted by the spurious 'transphobic' attack. The disapproval of someone like Quinn, whose profile was still increasing, gave them little room to manoeuvre or be heard.

In the end, a rather unlikely group, /v/ from 4Chan, came to their rescue, donating the money they needed to finish their project (and birthing Vivian James in the process). Gamergate would continue to support and boost TFYC well into Gamergate, through to the final execution of their project. A band of supposed misogynists and harassers helped a feminist group to help women in games because they were attacked by... women in games.

This doesn't exactly fit the narrative of sexist harassers.

Polaris Game Jam

The Polaris Game Jam was an effort between Polaris and Maker Studios to create a kind of 'reality show' around games programming and creation[63]. There's some reasons it fell apart, but part of the blame – and the cost – lies with Zoe Quinn who, self-admittedly, set out to cause it problems. Youtubers and other games figures were also pulled into the problems and dragged down with the ensuing failure.

Whether Polaris would have succeeded otherwise, we don't know. It had plenty of other problems, but deliberate sabotage certainly cannot have helped it. Of particular note concerning Polaris and TFYC, Quinn ended up taking money for and promoting her own game Game Jam, the 'Rebel Game Jam', which never materialised.

None of these elements makes any real odds as to whether she deserved to be trolled, harassed or abused. That's not the suggestion here. Rather this is to point out that this is no innocent victim. Quinn dished out much of what she ended up taking, was hypocritical about it and that there were lots of people who already had reasons to dislike Quinn. Victim blaming or not; I think it's less surprising that horrible people saying and doing horrible things get flak, even if perfectly lovely people do too.

The Zoe Post

In August of 2014 Eron Gjoni – at that point, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend, posted 'The Zoe Post[64]' up as a blog. For somewhat inexplicable reasons this caught the public imagination within the gaming community. This was possibly due to pre-existing hostility towards Quinn over her non-game, and her actions within the community. She had also been cashing in on the growing 'social justice' attacks on gaming. Whatever the reason, Gjoni's rather intimate break-up blog got spread all over the Internet, along with all of its salacious details. Once it hit 4chan, it was all over. There was no stopping it.

When you read the post itself, it is obviously and self-evidently the long-winded catharsis of a heartbroken man, a man betrayed by his lover and – frankly - abused by her. By her definitions contained within screenshots and logs in the blogs, she raped him. Her behaviour seems consistently psychologically abusive (though of course, this is a biased sample from an antagonistic blog). Her ambition and other factors appear to have led her, in particular, to sleep with a total of five different men behind Eron's back.

Some have tried to portray his actions in outing her as slut shaming or somehow indefensible. Many of us, however, do consider Eron to be a victim of abuse and an example of how there is a double standard around such issues for men. If a woman had written this kind of post about a man cheating on and abusing her, the reception would have been much different.

What Eron did is no different to what many women have done without much in the way of blow-back. Warning people away from abusive exes or potentially dangerous men is seen as a service to the community, not so much vice versa. 'Rapist' lists, with no backing, just open accusation, have even been circulated at universities, with little push-back or acrimony[65].

Warn fellow women about men, without any evidence, accusing them of being sex criminals, and you're a folk hero.

Inform fellow men about an abusive woman, with copious evidence and references, and you're a folk villain.

“There ain't no justice”, as the saying goes.

Further, Gjoni ended up being gagged by a court order, imposed by Quinn, making him unable to talk about the Zoe Post or its surrounding issues. This was considered a violation of Gjoni's first amendment rights by several legal observers and would have made a good test case if Quinn hadn't dropped her case and Gjoni had been able to continue. Needless to say, this activated the interest of a lot of free speech advocates and, coupled with the abuse involved in the case, also engaged a lot of Men's Human Rights Activists – as well as gamers.

All of the legal wranglings are – frankly – beyond me, and it never made it to court anyway as the case it was tied in with was dropped/dismissed. There was no stomach within the legal system to take such a case forward purely for setting a precedent about first amendment rights. If you want to learn more, there is a Reddit thread that goes into detail and references the whole process[66].

Whatever you think of the Zoe Post and whether it was misogynistic or whatever else, the information within it did reveal corruption and a lack of journalistic ethics. That's no contestable.

Five Guys & Quinnspiracy

Initially, of course, what garnered people's attention was the sex scandal. Gjoni did not come off any better from that than Quinn did. Being cheated on with five guys led to some early adopters overusing the term 'cuck' that is now, unfortunately, so familiar to us all. At least, at the time, they were using it in something closer to its original context.

People put a lot of effort into figuring out who the 'five guys' were. The correlation with the burger restaurant of the same name led to a lot of memes at the expense of Quinn and her indoor-football team of lovers. 'Five Guys' was primarily just this, making fun of the tawdry sexual escapades. It was gossip. It was uncharitable, mean, but not anything to be too concerned over.

Quinnspiracy, on the other hand – a term coined, apparently, by a Youtuber 'Internet Aristocrat' (currently Mr Metokur), was something a little more. When you understand who Quinn's alleged lovers were, it becomes somewhat more apparent as to why this would upset and concern people.

- Guy 1: Brandon McMartin – A sound engineer at an indie games company, Polytron.

- Guy 2: Kyle Pulver – A lead developer at indie games company Retro Affect

- Guy 3: Nathan Grayson – A games journalist writing for Kotaku and previously Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

- Guy 4: Robin Arnott – Another sound engineer and indie games developer.

- Guy 5: Joshua Boggs – Co-founder of Quinn's employer, at the time, Loveshack (and allegedly married, just to add some spice to the tale).

Only three of these are concrete. Two are speculative, based on examination of screenshots, but the most important one is Nathan Grayson, and that one is confirmed.

This was tawdry, perhaps. A little squalid. There were plenty of things for people to make fun of and – maybe – a few destroyed relationships, not to mention the creation of some trust issues. Still, other than making fun of it, so what? These are the kinds of people you might expect someone to have an affair with, people moving in the same circles, work colleagues and so on. No big whoop, right?

Except for Nathan Grayson. Grayson was a journalist. Grayson had covered Quinn glowingly in three articles without disclosing their relationship[67][68][69]. This was a clear-cut and obvious breach of journalistic ethics and far from the only lapse on Grayson's part[70].

Now there was something with some meat on its bones. Now it wasn't just a sex scandal and 'cuckoldry' to be laughed at. Now it was a failure in journalistic integrity, an explanation as to why 'non-games' were getting so much publicity and an opportunity to strike back at the censors and 'critics'. It demonstrated that the 'holier than thou' Indies and their boosters were just as corrupt as the big companies and news outlets.

Censorship

Both the 'Five Guys' initial sex scandal and the resulting 'Quinnspiracy' that came after it were heavily censored, even by sites you wouldn't normally expect to be censor-happy. These included, but were not limited to:

- 4Chan (V)

- Depression Quest Forum

- Escapist

- Kotaku's comments

- N4G

- NeoGAF

- Reddit (games, gaming)

- Youtube

- Vice's comments

This raised hackles due to the anti-censorship nature of internet culture and the fact that, to many, it seemed to indicate collusion (this was later to be confirmed) and bias. Censorship and suppression of the first aspect – the sex scandal – might have been somewhat excusable, but as the media scandal unfolded, it became unreasonable.

Without the censorship, things would likely have blown over. They would probably have been limited to the scandal and corruption as it directly related to Quinn and nothing more. As a result of the censorship, more energy and outrage was pumped into the system; more trust was broken with the 'mainstream' games media and more attention was paid to what was going on in the background.

The censorship issue would go on to inflame and dog Gamergate. It created an enormous bias, with Gamergate being unable to defend itself in standard media spaces or even in the comments section of articles made to attack it. It contributed to a useless and biased Wikipedia article; a media two-minutes hate against Gamergate. It helped create a strawman of a group that – for all the shitposting and bad taste humour – had genuine and pressing concerns about media ethics and censorship. These concerns were not helped by that self-same media continuing to be unethical and engaging in censorship around Gamergate.

The silencing tactics, apparently intended to prevent a witch hunt, all but created Gamergate and helped turn it into a general investigation and counter-outrage at 'social justice' and the games media. Gamergate's enemies are the ones who made it a 'thing' and who kept it going. They've even periodically brought it back to life.

In the words of the meme, 'Congratulations. You played yourself'.

Gamergate

So far we – still – haven't gotten to Gamergate, but there is a chain of events here that lead up to it.

The spark that ignites the fire that would become Gamergate is the 'Five Guys, Burgers and Fries' scandal.

This, in turn, became the Quinnspiracy - with its attendant censorship and rising suspicion.

This still wasn't Gamergate.

Gamergate started after the Youtuber MundaneMatt was censored, Internet Aristocrat did a video about Quinn, and Hollywood star Adam Baldwin tweeted out that video[72] accompanied by the hashtag, #Gamergate on August the 27th. That video was, and is, a good place to see the collected irritation and concerns that were to emerge throughout Gamergate.

This almost exactly coincided with the emergence of what have come to be called the 'Gamers are dead' articles. A rather suspicious series of articles from many, supposed, games sites denigrating their audience and proclaiming the 'end of the gamer identity'[73]. This was as suspicious to gamers as the coordinated censorship and, in time, was proven to originate in a secret journalist email list, Gamejournopros (more information on this later).

This was a shocking, coordinated attack by games journalism, which was increasingly under scrutiny, against their ostensible audience. Little wonder they would seek to protect their skin, but it was blatant, open, ideological and disgusting.

Outlets involved were:

- Ars Technica

- Buzzfeed

- Daily Beast

- Destructoid

- Financial Post

- Gamasutra (three times)

- GamesONnet

- Guardian

- Kotaku

- Polygon

- Rock, Paper, Shotgun

- VG247

- Vice

The games community's concerns about corruption and ethics were brushed off and censored. Their concerns about censorship were, themselves, censored. The very outlets that should have been looking into these issues and addressing their audience's concerns turned on them. They bent the mainstream media into a false narrative of misogyny, sexism and harassment right from the get go.

Gamers were even more outraged by this slander and marginalisation.

This was, now, war.

Chapter Five: Gamergate Itself

Now we were into Gamergate, but Gamergate itself is a huge, sprawling mess and there aren't any good ways to break it down. A timeline would rapidly become an indecipherable mess and unravelling claims and counter-claims is – similarly – unlikely to be productive and likely to be terribly confusing to anyone not already aware of everything.

Rather, I have decided to divide my explanations and examinations of Gamergate into looser areas. I have decided to explain and to examine those areas discretely (so much as is possible) and to try and explain how Gamergate tied into, influenced or was influenced by these issues.

Necessarily this also involves me presenting my interpretations and positions on these issue. I am aware of my bias as a left-libertarian type of person, and now you are too.

Culture & Politics

There's no question that Gamergate has been swept up into the 'culture war' that has been going on in western nations, but most especially America. A shallow analysis might conclude this to be a left/right conflict or one between conservatives and progressives. That same analysis tends to consider Gamergate to be right wing and reactionary when nothing could be further from the truth.

It is true that Gamergate is part of a more general exasperation with Social Justice Warriors and this same phenomenon of frustration and annoyance has fed the populist right. Gamergate, however, and much of the opposition to Social Justice Warriors, in general, comes from people who classify themselves as classical liberals or 'cultural libertarians'[74]. Someone like Bill Maher can hardly be described as right wing. He has a consistently anti-PC and pro-free-speech stance and has run afoul of the same sorts of people[75].

It's not just the right-wing that takes a stand against the censorious attitudes and pseudo-science of the 'progressive' left wing. There's a lot of liberals, free speech advocates, sceptics and others on the more traditional left who are horrified by the threats the 'progressive' left presents to art, expression and dialogue. The right has latched onto this as their attitudes and beliefs are now less popular and less present in society. Even so, when genuine liberals are being called names for being willing to stand up for 'icky speech'[76] (political or otherwise), something has gone wrong.

The Baldwin Tweet

Adam Baldwin's tweet on Gamergate coined the hashtag and the final name for the movement. It also gave the campaign a huge amount of exposure from his quarter of a million followers. It brought it to the attention to a significant number of people – unfortunately in hindsight – on the right-hand side of the political spectrum. As a rare conservative figure in Hollywood, his voice carried a reasonable amount of weight and influence in those quarters.

While he was good for getting the word out at a time when games and conventional media were engaged in the creation of a false narrative, his involvement ultimately helped those against Gamergate. It helped them to paint it as a right-wing movement. Thanks to him they were able to present it as part of a reactionary backlash against progressivism. In reality, it was more of a libertarian backlash against authoritarianism and corruption and an assertion of genuine liberal principles. Having been noticed by and treated credibly by the right, little wonder that only right wing media and celebrities (for the most part) would discuss it or take it seriously. In such polarised societies, this did as much harm as good.

Anti-Censorship

While the main thrust of Gamergate was corruption and ethical breaches in the media, this cannot be disentangled from the virulently anti-censorship bent of both Internet and Gaming culture – which cross over enormously. This factor is further entangled since many of the journalists involved and many of the stories they have spun, which first earned Gamers' scorn, are attempts to censor. They're social – and financial – efforts to mark down and force game creators to bow to the hyper-PC agendas that they are pushing.

The excuse given for this behaviour is often that it is 'criticism', but in practice, it is an attempt to censor, control and shame publishers and creators into changing what they are producing. The difference between criticism and censorship might be expressed as the difference between “I don't like this,” and “This shouldn't exist.” The latter is the position of the 'cultural critics' like Antia Sarkeesian who try to mobilise social shaming and an engaged and vocal minority to force companies to change things. This attitude is then further expressed and pushed by large chunks of the gaming media – the betrayal of their audience which bothers so many of them.

To gamers, this all reeks of previous attempts to censor and control games. The scaremongering and moral panics are familiar, only the content of the rhetoric has changed.

A peculiarity of recent politics is that the left wing has become authoritarian and censorious, while the right-wing has embraced its more libertarian side. This has shifted things to the point where 'free expression' has become seen as a right-wing issue and even derided by the left as 'freeze peach'[77]. This seems to have happened as left-wing ideas (or pseudo-left ideas) have become ascendant and have gained power, while right wing viewpoints have lost power and authority. As right wing ideas have become marginalised, they have gained an appreciation for the value of free expression just as the left used to when its ideas were marginalised. Now that the pseudo-left are the ones with the power they seem willing to 'pull the ladder up behind them' and to deny others the rights they gained so much from.

When we're talking about power here, we're not just talking about political power. Conservative forces are ascendant – at the time of writing – in both the US and UK. Social power, academic power, cultural power can all be just as strong, or stronger, in the current social paradigm. Social power determines 'acceptability', terms and rules that are self-enforcing while government power has to be enforced.

It's also worth noting the seeming paradox here. Companies have held the whip over the games media for many years, through financial means, forcing them to write better reviews and to tow the line if they wanted early releases. In some ways, things have reversed to an extent, with some games' writers seeming to hold the whip over the companies. They're doing this via their social justice criticism, which terrifies companies and has them scrambling to be pleasing – most of the time. You'd think this might balance their power over each other somewhat, but instead, we seem to get the worst of both problems.

Something Rotten in Games Media

There has been something wrong, or rather many things wrong, in games media for some time, and it goes back a long way. Games media used to be either a hobby press or a house organ. Magazines, back when these kinds of things were in print, were either glorified catalogues for their parent company or 'enthusiast press', not dissimilar to any other niche interest hobby.

Early games writers were drawn from the hobbyists who constructed computers, with no real agenda and a pragmatic view towards games. Did they work? Were the graphics good? Did they show something cool that the computer could do? Were they fun? That was pretty much the extent of their interest in it.

Once gaming in and of itself became more of a thing, you began to see specialist games reviewers. These were – perhaps – a bit more discerning. These kinds of reviews began with breathless enthusiasm, turning to more cynical and humorous observations going into the 90s. This was also the period in which the companies established their press to talk up their products and act as spokesmen for them.

Something else began to happen as we moved into the 2000s. By 2010 the games press as starting to fill up with ideology and snooty judgement. Gamers were having a hard time getting the 'objective game reviews' (meaning subjective but about the actual game rather than social issues) and were increasingly finding themselves alienated from their press. It was frustrating, especially once the media started to side with the censor-critics and this built a tremendous amount of resentment up towards the press and the people they were toadying up to.

This was also the period – the 2000s - in which financial corruption began to creep in, seriously.

Companies wielded their direct and indirect financial muscle to demand better reviews and to ensure cooperation by games media outlets. Failure to cooperate would mean the loss of early access and advertising revenue. Lost access meant fewer exclusives and a delay in news, fatal in the immediacy of the Internet.

That was probably the first factor in the emerging problems with games media. The age of the Internet meant disruption to existing revenue models (magazine sales and advertising) and placed much more emphasis purely on the advertising side and the necessity for quick action. These rendered games sites highly vulnerable to manipulation by companies and also had a secondary effect. The need for clicks to feed advertising. This led to the increased importance of 'controversial' articles, and few things drew more clicks than making people angry. There was no better way to anger gamers than to judge them, tell them off and to attack the things they loved.

This doesn't explain all of the rot though. I speculate that there is something else at work. Many of the newer games writers seem to be of a like type, frustrated journalism degree holders or those with 'wobbly' humanities degrees. They're looking for work, looking to apply what they learned and they seem to fall into games media via an interest in the Internet and new media. I suspect that there is a measure of frustration and annoyance. There's a desire to make a difference of some kind, to apply what they learned about critical theory and activism, and yet they find themselves faced with an indifferent, even hostile, audience.

The audience just wants to know if the games are any good or not. They don't want to be lectured, felt guilty or to have the real world dragged into their fantasy space.

At the same times, you have issues around the games media regarding nepotism and corruption. 'Payola' has long been the case and sponsorship has been at the status of self-parody for years[78]. While this was derided and criticised, it became the accepted status quo. Everyone knew review scores were nonsense. Everyone knew that pay-for-reviews and other nastiness was taking place, and so everything was taken with a grain of salt. The corruption and nepotism that triggered Gamergate was at a whole new level of hypocrisy, however, especially coming from journalists who had previously decried the existing state of corruption. Here we had reporters sleeping with developers and PR people[79], financially supporting each other, sharing homes and otherwise being thoroughly entangled with each other.

This was more personal, this was petty, and this was politicised. It was coming from hypocrites who had expended lots of time and effort decrying gamers and games and alienating themselves from their audience. People who had presumed to tell gamers they were better than them, were proven to be anything but. Hypocrisy is all but guaranteed to whip people up.

Gamergate's Politics

Almost since Gamergate's advent, it has been characterised as some right-wing, reactionary movement.

This has never been true.

Gamergate had people involved in it from all across the political spectrum, but it was primarily a left-libertarian grouping [80]. The basis for much of Gamergate's objections to 'social justice warriors' and what they were trying to do through the games media and the corruption that ensues, comes from that left-wing, small 'l' libertarian focus if anything.

Left wing values tend to be egalitarian and anti-hierarchical, while 'Social Justice Warriors' tend to be feminist, rather than egalitarian, and seek to establish a hierarchy and forms of social control. Where libertarians want the minimum necessary intervention, the Regressive Left seem to want to legislate and enforce thought crimes and to determine not only what you can't say, but what you must say[81].

Left-libertarians tend to see censorship, for whatever reason, as a regressive step and they tend to value an open marketplace of ideas. These left-libertarians are much more tolerant of opposing ideas, dissent, debate, dialectic and are – perhaps – the real inheritors of liberal and Enlightenment ideas and values.

Journalist Brad Glasgow conducted a more professional investigation into the political attitudes present in Gamergate and is, apparently, also working on a book about Gamergate to show his point of view. His is a much more neutral position than mine. I suggest that you read this book once it is out. He has, however, released some of his findings already online and it is worth summarising some of these [82].

- Gamergate self-identified overwhelmingly as liberal or centrist.

- American Gamergate members overwhelmingly voted for Obama, or not at all.

- British Gamergate members mostly either didn't vote or voted for Labour or the Liberal Democrats.

- Over 80% agree that human climate change is real.

- Over 90% believe marijuana should be legal.

- Over two thirds are against the death penalty.

- Over 90% agree with gay marriage.

- Over 90% are in favour of abortion.

- Over 75% are in favour of socialised healthcare.

- Over 70% agree the gender of a game protagonist doesn't matter.

- Less than 10% regularly read Breitbart (and keep in mind, Breitbart was one of the only outlets to give Gamergate a fair shake).

This is hardly the picture of the sexist, racist, reactionary, conservative hotbed of right wing bigotry one might have otherwise been led to expect. Certainly, there were minorities of hard right people – and people all over the political spectrum – and they were quite visible. This is, however, a testament to how one or two unifying principles can bring huge numbers of people together from very different mindsets and political positions for the same, singular, purpose. This is the very lesson that the Occupy movement completely and utterly failed to learn.

There are ways in which Gamergate does differ from the more extreme Regressive Left viewpoints dominant in academia, games media and the Indie scene, however. Gamergate tended to take a much more meritocratic perspective and to be against positive discrimination on a racist or sexist basis. It did not buy into objectification theory any more than it had bought into the idea that games made people violent. It was sceptical of patriarchy theory and tended to be ruthlessly egalitarian, believing people could and should make it on their merits, without unequal assistance. These attitudes – and the removal of benevolent racism and sexism – seem to be enough to be called right wing.

This isn't helped by Internet culture's heavy use of irony, sarcasm, dark and un-PC humour. All of these can give an appearance deliberately at odds with people's values and made stronger by anonymity.

Blockbots and Echo Chambers

The polarisation of political opinion is a hot topic, and a lot of people blame social media for worsening it[83]. This is certainly a part of it. The algorithms on sites like Facebook and Youtube tend to serve us up material similar to that that we already consume. This reinforces our existing self-selection and greatly diminishes our exposure to other points of view. We know, sadly, that only interacting with like-minded people causes people to trend towards the more extreme points of view[84].

Algorithms and selection bias are far from the only causes of this phenomenon. At the more extreme end of self-selection is the increasing tendency to block anyone who disagrees. People end friendships over political or other differences, even when they're quite minor. This seems to get worse and worse year on year, and it takes increasing amounts of effort to seek out and encounter alternative points of view.

This isn't helped by the media abdicating its position on reporting THE news, and increasingly reporting 'A' news. Fox News is perhaps the most blatant example of this, pandering to the existing biases of their audience. In the UK the newspaper The Daily Mail is, perhaps, the most egregious example of this and, both audiences end up with distorted views of reality[85] due to the 'news' they consume. Similar issues occur with outlets like The Guardian, and MSNBC, just on the other side of the political spectrum.

Even more sinister has been the emergence of 'block bots. These are mostly found on Twitter, though versions have appeared about other sites, links and social media platforms. The basic idea isn't necessarily a bad one. You have a list of bad actors on such a site (spammers, trolls, abusive accounts) and that list is propagated so that anyone who uses it can automatically block everyone on that list and avoid encountering these people.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, what could have been a useful anti-spam/anti-abuse tool ended up almost immediately being politicised. This goes back before Gamergate and back to Atheism Plus. In that community, during/after the split between the political atheists and sceptic atheists, a user from the first camp – called 'Oolon' put together the first popularly acknowledged 'Block Bot'. Needless to say, for all the talk about it blocking abusers and other 'troublesome' people, it was as much about politics as it was abuse. A huge number of individuals from the opposing camp ended up on the Block Bot simply for disagreeing, and all it ended up doing was creating a worsening echo chamber[86].

During Gamergate, something similar happened. Cheap hack and script-kiddy Randi Harper put together a similar Block Bot, listing anyone who had used the #Gamergate hashtag and anyone who followed more than a couple of people who had – guilt by association. It then blocked them for everyone who subscribed to that block list. Hilariously this led to many companies and commercial accounts being blocked – including KFC. Less hilariously the information about who was on the list was accessible, and they were described as abusers, harassers and other rather nasty, libellous terms. This was lauded as an anti-abuse tool, but like the Atheism Plus Block Bot it was, rather an echo chamber creator and a de facto blacklist[87] by an abuser and disgusting human being[88].

Again this only made things worse, since people who disparaged Gamergate were flooded with refutations, counter comments and explanations, as well as trolls. This meant a great many people signed up to use this list and ended up cut off from accurate or opposing information. This included a lot of media people who had been poisoned against Gamergate ahead of time, they never even had an opportunity to see the truth or have their minds changed. Even worse, the Independent Game Developer's Association (IGDA) endorsed the politicised Autoblocker as an 'anti-harassment tool' and passively as a blacklist.

As it turned out, there were legal issues with these Block Bots regarding both data protection and libel. I was one of the people looking into potential legal action against both the Block Bot and the Good Game Autoblocker regarding the libellous aspect. As a result, there were changes made in both bots, their hosting and wording to avoid the legal implications. Unfortunately, it didn't put an end to them, but it did inconvenience the creators and helped force that change[89]. Other block lists and block bots have continued to proliferate, however.

Harper was also the creator of a Twitter bot that spammed out messages to the Gamergate hashtag and, superficially, appeared to be someone against or clueless about Gamergate, asking questions and engaging with people. I have the dubious honour of being one of the people drawn in by this. I ended up exchanging a handful of messages (4 or so) with the bot. I engaged with it as I had been engaging many other people in the tag, trying to counter the negative narratives that were being spread around. I also have the dubious honour of having the embarrassing episode broadcast full strength by Wil Wheaton.

I guess 'don't be a dick' is an aspiration, not an actual, personal rule [90].

Feminism & Men's Rights

Gamergate has been caught up in an ongoing and increasing cultural conflict – mainly but not entirely online – between increasingly radical, authoritarian and censorious feminism and the rise of Men's Human Rights Activism (MHRA). This was down to a few important factors and places of commonality between the two, broad communities.

A lot of the interference in games and many other matters have come from a fairly radical, authoritarian fringe of feminism against whom many Men's Rights groups are aligned.

Men's Human Rights Activists have been misrepresented and slandered by the media in much the same manner Gamergate was treated, there's a common cause.

Both Gamers and Men's Human Rights Activists tend to reject Identity Politics.

Hardcore gamers are still majority male.

There is a commonality in a more egalitarian and meritocratic point of view, rather than one of positive discrimination.

Of course, the participation of MHRAs in Gamergate, while welcomed at a time Gamergate needed allies didn't help their image in the public eye. MHRAs have long been smeared as misogynistic, traditionalistic, anti-woman and so forth. With Gamergate being, similarly, spuriously accused of those same things it made it seem like confirmation to those with existing prejudice against either group.

Nonetheless, the alliance seemed to prove fruitful for both parties. Both had crossover with the sceptic community that emerged after the Atheism Plus débâcle, and all three groups became very adept at using the Internet and alternative media to get their message out – whatever the failings of mainstream media.

Archly feminist analysis invaded the gaming space and failed to make its points, instead of coming across as a repeat of the Satanic Panic and violence controversies. Rather than create the change they wanted, it created enemies. MHRAs gained a lot of ground level support and exposure via the Gamergaters. This appears, indeed, to have contributed to the visibility and popularity of the documentary about Men's Issues, The Red Pill [91].

I don't consider myself to be a Men's Human Rights Activist for many of the same reasons I don't consider myself a feminist, but an egalitarian. There are extremists – though less of them – involved in Men's Rights. Many of them are, understandably, bitter and twisted over what has happened to them and are very angry, in a way that overrides the reasoned passion that accomplishes more. I also don't like the tone and style of sites such as A Voice for Men. I simply can't feel comfortable alongside Conservative or 'crank' men's issues advocates like Philip Davies and Mike Buchanan, even when they do the right thing about men's issues in particular.

That said, there are plenty of things within the Men's Human Rights Movement that I cannot help but agree with. Family court should be equal. The barbaric practice of infant circumcision should be banned. I would like to see the extension of some manner of reproductive rights extended to men. I want to see the end of the Duluth model. Internationally I want to halt the erosion of men's right to be presumed innocent. I want to reverse the massive reduction of men completing university and want to try and address the balance of male teachers in primary schooling. There are so many genuine problems men face (violence, substance abuse and homelessness) disproportionately, but the people trying to bring these things up just end up being demonised.

That's not right.

Effective Protest

Gamergate has contributed to a changing game of online protest and, indeed, protest culture in general. This has had a resounding effect on politics of both left and right and has been a big part of why Gamergate keeps being mentioned – somewhat unfairly – about Trump's presidential campaign and support. A better example would, perhaps, be Black Lives Matter.

There's little doubt that Gamergate was an incredibly effective protest, continually confounding expectations that it would die or falter. It accomplished many of its goals and also managed to deal a lot of damage to its enemies. Bad faith journalists were driven out, policies changed, and Gamergate contributed to the death of the website Gawker to the tune of seven figures. This, the constant bad publicity Gamergate was causing, and the lawsuit with Hulk Hogan conspired, together, to ruin the site. In the end, it came together to put an end to their clickbait and bad practices[92].

So how did Gamergate do this?

How did they make it work?

What has been their influence on other protests and their legacy?

Unity

Gamergate was able to unify a huge amount of people around two issues.

The demand for a more ethical and community serving games media.

Anti-Censorship.

Much as people laughed at the idea of 'Actually, it's about ethics in games journalism', it was. Every step that their enemies took appeared to confirm that this was an issue, whether by colluding over 'Gamers Are Dead' or misrepresenting the movement as a whole. All of these actions simply showed that games media – and much of the mainstream media – were an ethical desert.

Censorship was very much a rallying cry for people of all kinds. Genuine liberal and left wing people despise censorship, the right-wing has found itself on the receiving end of a lot of censorship, and for gamers and Internet natives, anti-censorship is in the blood.

By focussing on these issues, Gamergate failed to succumb – at least for most of its most active period – to the kinds of divisions that broke up movements like Occupy. Gamergate was able to unite right, left, liberal, libertarian, older, younger and every other group all over the place into one for one (perhaps two) causes.

That couldn't last forever of course and as Gamergate won battles and began to diminish in scale, size and vehemence those divisions began to appear. 'Ethics cucks' were dismissed by the relatively small number of conspiracy theorists and far-right people, who ended up splitting off into 'Gamergate Revolt'. Further, the tactics and antics of a minority of participants like The Ralph Retort and the increasing politicisation of media supporters like Milo, during the US election, meant the centre – eventually – couldn't hold.

Still, the tactic of staying cohesive and effective for such a long time – by focusing on the main two issues to the near exclusion of all else – worked. By keeping to a consistent and unifying message, Gamergate could try to keep things simple and stay on track.

Operation Disrespectful Nod

Games and Gamers had already been under attack for a long time even before Gamergate. Frustration and exasperation had been growing for some time, and they had seen how Twitter mobs and Social Justice Warriors often applied pressure to companies with shaming tactics, boycotts, letters to advertisers and bad media publicity. Perhaps Gamergate couldn't get the last, given their problems with the media, but the rest they could do and turn back around on the people who had intruded on them.

Gamergate successfully adopted enemy tactics, ferociously attacking the journalists who had ethical failings, digging up information on them, finding their conflicts of interest – and exposing them. They also took the 'Gamers are Dead' sites to task, as well as other sites that attacked their subculture and customer base. They informed advertisers that they did not approve and did not want them supporting sites that did this.

Some might consider this hypocritical and censoring, but it was turning the enemy's tactics against them and holding them to their standards (Alinsky Rule 4)[93]. In protesting what Gamergate was doing and decrying it as censorship, their opposition only succeeded in exposing themselves as hypocrites. They could hardly complain about people mobilising in the exact way that they had used themselves to push their agenda.

Personally, I was never really comfortable with this tactic. I prefer to take and keep the moral high ground if at all possible. I have been the subject of boycotts – albeit based on bad information and lies – and that makes me wary of trying to harm companies – even Gawker – by going after their bottom line. It just doesn't strike me as fair, especially when such action can stem from bad information or moral panics. There's no denying the effectiveness though.

#NotYourShield

The narrative that Gamergate was entirely made up of white, heterosexual, cisgender men was never particularly convincing, even though that remains the majority market for games (at least in the west). Nor was it clear why this, rather than what they said, did or wanted was particularly damning, unless you're sexist, racist and cisphobic. Still, this was the claim from the start as some way of trying to de-legitimise Gamergate as a reactionary wave of racism and male fragility. Needless to say, this frustrated a lot of female and minority gamers who were fully on board with Gamergate – or at least were fed up with white, middle-class college activists presuming to speak on their behalf.

Indeed this was a striking thing throughout Gamergate. Consistently the anti-Gamergate groups and speakers lacked in diversity, while gaming events, conventions (and Gamergate itself) were a whirlpool of diversity – in thought as well as gender, colour and sexuality[94]. Thought to be the one that matters.

NotYourShield was set up as a counter-narrative to these claims made against Gamergate's diversity. Self-identified Gamergaters (and others) who had minority status spoke up, using the hashtag, appealing to journalists and activists to stop presuming to speak for them and to stop attacking a cause they believed in. None of them took up the challenge, despite continuing to claim to speak for minorities.

Of course, immediately after the advent of the tag, it was attacked.

It was claimed that this was an 'operation' by 4chan (it did originate on that site, but wasn't an orchestrated fake) and that most of the people posting on it were sockpuppets (fake accounts). In fact, the idea of the tag was coined by 'Polar Roller' on 4Chan's /v/ board, and tweeted by Ninouh90 not long after, before taking off by itself.

NotYourShield was useful in demonstrating that Gamergate was more diverse, especially once people – controversially – felt forced to step away from their anonymity to prove that they were real[95]. This exposed people to increasing attacks, including attacks on their jobs and attempts to doxx and threaten them – not that this got anything like as much exposure as alleged attacks on anti-Gamergate did. The attacks on me certainly didn't get any exposure, at least not of the sympathetic kind.

The substantial diversity, in all ways, of Gamergate stood in opposition to the politics of victimhood presented by their opposition. Minorities involved in Gamergate appeared to want to be treated equally, to be given an equal shot with everyone else. They seemed to value the equal standing that online anonymity gives people, and appeared to see a lot of what Gamergate opposed as being well-meaning idiots screwing things up that they enjoyed. At the very least they did not see or acknowledge the supposed racial or gender issues the activists were raising. Many described feeling patronised and talked down to by 'Social Justice' activists who were treating them in a manner more appropriate to patronising colonialism, rather than genuinely wanting to help.

There were, of course, people who did fake, who did take advantage and who did troll using sockpuppets. This – as with most things – turned out to be much more widespread behaviour on the part of trolls and Anti-Gamergate, but it did happen the other way.

'Alison Prime', a prominent lesbian member of Gamergate and NotYourShield for some time, was eventually outed as a scammer. This scammer Steven Polk used his fake identity to get close to women and to try and get money for a home situation that may or may not have been fake itself. He was outed by Gamergate and was proven to be about as real as prominent anti-Gamergater Peter Coffin's girlfriend[101]. Gamergate was always most critical, suspicious and careful about itself and policing its collective behaviour in a way anti-Gamergate never was.

Tag-Flooding

Being almost entirely cut off from mainstream and games media access, Gamergate had to continually seek out new ways to get themselves heard. This was especially important given the adoption of Block Bots by general users. Their spread was based on the lie that Gamergate was a gang of harassers and bigots, and the truth that they did swarm people who mentioned them to debunk and discuss.

One of the ways Gamergate found to get around this was to 'hijack' trending hashtags or hashtags used by events on Twitter. Despite heavy usage the Gamergate tag – and related tags, even new ones that were adopted – was often de-listed by Twitter, under apparent social pressure, reducing its visibility. Hijacking tags allowed them to bypass this censorship – and probably made things worse than simply allowing the blog to continue to trend and auto-fill.

To be heard Gamergate would adopt new tags – like rotating a phaser frequency to get past a Borg shield – or it would 'invade' these other tags. Games conventions, tech shows and popular tags were all hit in this way, flooding them with information, countering narratives or demanding that attention be drawn to the bad actors in the gaming community. Particular targets were conventions, tech-industry or gaming related tags, but anything could be hit.

One especially effective example came when Gamergate brigaded the tag being used for a conference by the Society for Professional Journalism (the SPJ). The journalists were bewildered and taken aback at this happening, but the SPJ had long been held up as an example of what Gamergate wanted from games journalists regarding ethical standards[96].

There was something of a battle over informing the SPJ of who and what Gamergate was with anti-Gamergate making some headway in turning them off to the movement and getting many to adopt the auto blocker. The tag-flood did, however, manage to pique the interest of maverick journalist Michael Koretzky who ended up setting up a conference meeting specifically to discuss Gamergate and ethics in journalism – AirPlay.

Alternative Media

People have tried, repeatedly, to tie Gamergate to Trump and the 'Post-Truth' political era. There is one arena in which they may have something of a point, and that is about people's relationship with the media. The events of Gamergate crushed a huge number of people's trust in the mainstream media, whether it be newspapers, national networks or the online offerings of large companies.

This problem with the mainstream media began almost right from the start. The Guardian accidentally leaked an email[97] that demonstrated a bias from the get-go. Guardian journalists were prevented from talking with Gamergate and getting their point of view. Also Leigh Alexander[98], a games journalist increasingly involved in the ethical problems Gamergate was protesting, was invited in to give her spin and create a narrative. There was no chance for anyone else to present their opinion without that pre-existing bias.

When it came to Gamergate, the actions and corruption of the media was a large-scale application of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[99]. Briefly stated, this is what happens when we read a news story about something we know and understand. It rapidly becomes apparent to us that the journalist knows little to nothing about what they're reporting on. We scoff and dismiss what they're saying, but then we turn the page and read the next section – international politics perhaps – and instantly start treating them like they know what they're talking about again.

In this instance, however, perhaps due to the viciousness of the attacks and the new status of media as an increasingly partisan, pandering and click-baiting institution, gamers didn't forget when they 'turned the page'. In generations already turning to Youtube, social media and alternative outlets for their news and information this was a death blow to their trust.

Gamergate managed to make good headway on alternative and minority news outlets, got its message out in this new way and found that it didn't – so much – need more traditional media. They also made fantastic use of 'meme warfare', applying humour, in-jokes and artful trolling to play their opposition for fools and to make them look absurd – repeatedly.

It is true that the right-wing made up ground in recent years for many of the same reasons. Constant misrepresentations, hostility from and towards mainstream media, the polarisation and the loss of 'The News'. It's also true that conservatives have learned to use humour and memes (Pepe the frog for example[100]) to great effect and to successfully mock and satirise their enemies. They may well have learned some of this from Gamergate and the anti-Social Justice Warrior movement. They saw its effectiveness, perhaps via Breitbart and the self-promotional success of Milo Yiannopoulos' association with it.

I've been a news junkie since I was very young and while it has been somewhat heartening to see outlets like the BBC lagging behind the pandering going on in privately owned news companies. They have begun to however and their 'youth' content and Internet offerings, in particular, have been terrible when it comes to Internet culture. There is no option left anymore, other than to try and consume as much alternative media from as many different points of view as possible. Then, from all that conflicting information you have to seek to determine for yourself what is true and accurate. That can be exhausting and for most people, who has the time? That's a dangerous situation to be in.

Distributed Organisation

The idea of a distributed organisation without any real leadership is not new; it's an organisational structure that has been used in all manner of resistance movements, dissident groups and even terrorist organisations for many years. In recent memory, it is yet another element of modern protest that can traced back to the Occupy Movement. Occupy was a decentralised, Anarchistic movement with no real leadership. It emerged from a commonality of outrage and took off with the popularity of a cat meme before stumbling and falling apart from too many agendas. Gamergate drew on some of these ideas but was different in significant ways, some of which have already been discussed.

One of the most important ways in which Gamergate was different was that it was not only non-hierarchical, but it was also an example of emergent complexity. Gamergate was a comprehensive alliance of people with two, chief, concerns that united everyone (censorship and ethics). When something got its attention, it would naturally surge towards that issue, like a murmuration of starlings, without the need for leadership. All it needed was quick communication, which was facilitated by social media (especially Twitter) and image boards. Where there was broad agreement on an issue, there was critical mass and, hence, action. Where there wasn't, little happened.

There were no leaders, but different, popular spokesmen and women would rise and fall naturally as they gained or lost support – and Gamergate was very suspicious and wary of 'leaders' and 'cabals' trying to control it. This gave it a degree of resilience and plausible deniability that its opposition always lacked.

This, in many ways, made it impossible for its enemies to fight. They couldn't discredit leaders because there weren't any. Gamergate didn't care about 'toxic views' as they were beyond the issues. It couldn't be forced to turn on its own, outside of its own, emergent decisions to do so – so much as such a thing could be possible. For its enemies, this was like trying to nail jelly to a wall, couple that with Gamergate's vast-scale anonymity and its enemies were always shadowboxing. The opposition was never sure who or what was real, and even when they got it right, attacks on individual 'leaders' were pointless.

This did have its downsides, of course, anyone using the tag – troll or not – could be labelled 'Gamergate'. Without leaders or spokesmen, the media didn't know how to handle Gamergate. They had no idea who to talk to. Being an anonymous source, unwilling to break anonymity even for media sources (little wonder in a battle with the media) meant a lack of credibility. It wasn't impossible to talk to Gamergate, both Milo Yiannopoulos and Brad Glasgow managed to solve the problem. The games media had its agenda though, and the mainstream media was too lazy to put the work in that was necessary.

Interestingly mainstream media understands the things about Gamergate that it didn't understand before when it talks about Black Lives Matter [102]. Gamergate was held accountable for every anonymous troll comment, every spurious, untraceable, non-credible threat made in its name (or not). BLM has been forgiven every racist Facebook update, every criminal spokesman, even murders seemingly conducted in its name and chanting about killing police at its protests.

Whether this represents a political bias or having learned since Gamergate, remains to be seen.

Pseudoacademia

People look to the populist/right wing rise and assume that this means that society has become more right wing and regressive. In my opinion, we have seen a rise in extremity on the left-in-name-only and the alienation of liberals, libertarians and libertines. Nowhere has this alienation and horror directed at the pseudo-left been more apparent than about academia.

For years now, much of it concurrent with Gamergate, we have seen a rise in cultural conflict in and around universities. Controversial issues like no-platforming, trigger warnings and safe spaces have risen. We have minority students demanding segregation be returned. This time, segregation is somehow supposed to protect those minority students. We have language being characterised as violence, and violence being portrayed as expression – at least when it is used to silence and bar speakers. Once the bastion of the free speech movement, Berkeley, in particular, has become a flashpoint for the new censorship movement.

Those being attacked might be right-wing, and many of their views might be disgusting, regressive or simply uncomfortable, but they have a right to free expression just as much as anyone else does. This has long been a left/liberal principle, and it's one that seems to have been irreparably compromised.

We see an enormous political bias on campuses and a lack of balance of representation of different views[104] and this mono-polar environment has caused a degree of extremism. This extremism is most evident and prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, down to the denial of biology, physics and the scientific method itself. It is from these extreme and unscientific departments (exposed by the Sokal and 'Conceptual Penis' affairs) that much of the current criticism of games comes.

Disturbingly, this is the prevalent point of view in the emerging field of Games Studies. In groups like DiGRA we see this hostility writ large, not only towards games themselves but to the scientific method itself – via the rejection of peer review and proper methodology. They start from conclusions and select 'evidence' and interpretations to serve that end.

This has completely turned off the game audience itself from what could, otherwise, be a useful field of study. I, and others tried to create a journal and an alternative. We wanted something more study focussed, with a proper organisational structure, to look into games. There was simply no interest. The primary reason? Nobody saw any value in academic study of games, primarily because of the hash DiGRA and similar groups had made of it and the poor standard of their scholarship.

These are not scholars or academics; they're activists. They're not there to study but to try and force change. Sadly they're having some effect, especially since the games media, and then the games companies themselves, are buying into this.

The current crop of hostile games journalists and critics are mostly from this kind of background. They're steeped in postmodernism and gender theory, seeing themselves as people trying to 'make a difference', hostile to the subject of their own 'study' with no objectivity, no distance and massive bias. We're now seeing these problems play out in the wider culture war, especially at universities. To people from the outside, looking in – and even to people within universities – it looks awful. This is what other people have known for years.

As a game designer, I would love for there to be some useful, decent, accurate academic study into games. There's virtually nothing though. It might as well be book reports written by high-school students. It's about them and their thoughts and reactions, not the games themselves, not the structure. It's useless from a design point of view and from the position of free expression advocacy it's actively dangerous. They're providing fuel – on no scientific basis – for people to attack games and the Internet.

The United Fucking Nations!?

A massively important aspect of the power dynamic around Gamergate and the broader 'culture war' is the authority and importance of victimhood status. I first became aware of this – yet again – during the Occupy movement when 'The Progressive Stack'[105] was used to determine who got to speak and who didn't.

This is a kind of prejudice, where people's identity is given a primacy of importance over their eloquence, skill or ideas. It is the absolute opposite of the philosophy behind image-board anonymity, which emphasises merit and a viciously cruel marketplace of ideas. Essentially, the more 'oppressed' and marginal you are, the more protected groups you fit into, the more right you have to speak and the more weight your words are given. It's also starkly against left-wing philosophy, which advocates treating people equally, not creating special treatment or new hierarchies.

Claiming victimhood, claiming marginalisation is, perversely, an incredibly useful thing regarding both hard and soft power. The irony is that the whole concept rests upon the idea that you're powerless, and need compensation for that status. That you need to be granted advantage – rather than equality. That's an argument that can be had and many groups are, indeed making these arguments. It comes down to a battle between those who advocate that equality should mean equal treatment and those who advocate for compensatory inequality.

Speaking for myself, I'm an egalitarian. I don't think you can get to equality by pumping more inequality into the system. Certainly, in today's world, there are powerful arguments to be made that aspects of discrimination now more adversely affects men – especially in education[106]. There are also arguments to be made that 'positive discrimination' worsens race relations and creates resentment and problems as compared with assistance given by need. This may have contributed to the populist-right backlash and a sense of entitlement and outrage amongst communities constantly being told they are owed something due to history. Blaming whites, men, and heterosexuals for the alleged actions of their ancestors is like a secular version of original sin.

People resent it.

It certainly doesn't help the pursuit of equality.

If you happen to belong to any 'non-marginalised' group, you'll find your opinions being censored, ignored, and you'll find yourself being held responsible for perceived historical wrongs. Are you cisgender? Are you white? Are you male? Good luck getting heard or getting a fair shake, especially if you don't spend half an hour apologising for that first.

This power-dynamic narrative also lays behind the Orwellian attempts to redefine terms like racism and sexism to 'prejudice plus power' rather than simply 'discrimination' on the basis – in these cases – of race or gender. This is, in fact, a specialised sub-definition of racism used to describe systemic or systematic racism, not racism itself. The facile and shallow nature of this analysis, especially when it characterises all white people as privileged or holding power, is rendered apparent when you consider that the most racist demographics are the ones with the least power[107].

The whole idea of this 'Oppression Olympics' and the power dynamic in question goes from tragedy to farce when you consider how things around Gamergate played out.

- Who had unfettered and unchallenged access to the media?

- Who had governmental support? [108]

- Who continues to make thousands of dollars every month from 'sympathy' donations? [109]

- Who was invited to meet Google and spread their insane ideas? [110]

- Who was invited to participate on Twitter's 'Trust and Safety Council?' [111]

- Lastly, who, absurdly, was invited to speak to the United, fucking, Nations? [112].

These are not powerless, defenceless damsels in distress with no voices and no power, but they trade on that pseudo-scientific, sociological analysis and it simply may not be contradicted, lest you be excommunicated. These are – whether they mean to be or not – useful idiots for those who want to control the digital frontier.

'Fake News'

'Fake News' has become a sort of joke now, a meaningless phrase used by all sides to dismiss news stories they just don't happen to like. Nonetheless, when the term first emerged it had some genuinely useful meanings. Firstly it referred to the genuine cases of actual fake news[113], constructed stories designed explicitly as click-bait with little or no relation to anything in the real world. Secondly, it refers to the loss of 'The News', being replaced, increasingly, by slanted, profit-oriented news that panders to existing bias.

Claire Wardle has identified a full seven types of fake news, historical and current:

1. Satire or parody (no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool)

2. False connection (when headlines, visuals of captions don't support the content)

3. Misleading content (misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual)

4. False content (when genuine content is shared with false contextual information)

5. Imposter content (when legitimate sources are impersonated with false, made-up sources)

6. Manipulated content (when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive, as with a doctored photo)

7. Fabricated content (new content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm)

Gamergate was very much a victim of 'Fake News' in the forms 2, 3, 4 and 6. The laziness and bias of the media led to massive and widespread misrepresentation and a shattering of, already shaky, trust from millennials and grizzled, veteran Generation Xers in the news media. That's unfortunate, but it's justified, and that distrust has since spread.

Gamers are Dead

Gamergate probably would have been a flash in the pan, a mere, small skirmish, if it hadn't been for the 'Gamers, are Dead' articles. The mass attack by their media on their hobby and identity was an unprecedented betrayal of gamers, by the very people who should have been defending them. It got people's dander up and, ultimately, helped expose just how rotten, nepotistic and biased the whole edifice of games media was.

'Gamers are dead' was a cluster of articles of similar content that exploded across multiple sites swiftly following the advent of the Gamergate hashtag, but apparently put together before that change. They argued – broadly – that the 'gamer' identity was dead, in part due to the increasing popularity of games out of the hobbyist niche but mostly because of the 'misogyny', 'racism' etc. allegedly present in the gaming community.

This was, of course, absurd. Akin to declaring that the advent of the summer blockbuster and the chick flick meant that the identity of 'film buff' was dead. The groundless accusations made towards the gaming community were an attack, there was nothing meaningful there. That this came from the same media that – not so many years ago – had united with the gaming community against similar attacks gave it the outrage-energy of treachery. The combination of treachery and collusion – initially blamed on Silverstring Media but later discovered to be due to Gamejournopros – was too much to stand.

'Gamers are Dead' was a breakpoint in a slow-burning tension between the demands of the consumer for decent, impartial games reviews and the frustrated desires of games journalists to make their work more 'intellectual' and relevant. Gamers were tired of being constantly attacked by the likes of Sarkeesian, while games media lauded her and appeared to agree with her wacky analyses and failed to call her out for her failings. Sarkeesian was only the most visible symptom. Postmodern 'critical analysis' was infecting commentary and even reviews with increasing regularity and gamers were growing impatient with it interfering with their access to information.

You play games to escape; you read reviews and comments to learn about the games, not to be harangued with first-year gender studies analysis or to be proselytised to. Games are a fun pastime that's meant to make you feel good, fiction, an escape. They're not supposed to be a guilt trip.

The 'ringleader' of these articles appears to have been writer Leigh Alexander, writing for Gamasutra – at least she was the 'patient zero' for these attacks[114].

It's a nasty, squalid little article. It is full of nerd-shaming, which activates a 'race memory' of being bullied and marginalised that helped it incense gamers who thought we were past that shit, that 'nerd chic' was now a thing.

It dismisses online culture – that has proven itself to be so powerful since - as a crass, mercantile worship of Mammon, rather than fannish enthusiasm.

It fails – terrible in a supposed enthusiast press outlet – to understand that games are art, culture and that they genuinely matter. At the same time, the article paradoxically damns them for their deleterious effect in those same arenas.

It victim blames gamers for triggering the moral panics against them while furthering the new 'sexist' moral panic.

It unquestioningly and without investigation repeats the narrative of harassment and threats against women in the games industry, ignoring the similar attacks on men and not stopping to ask if it's true (listen and believe).

It doesn't acknowledge how open gaming always has been and particularly how it is now – as NotYourShield proved.

It even bemoans the complaints about poor journalistic ethics, while being an exemplar of those poor ethics, both as an article and in the shape of its writer! This was one of a set of articles conceived in private collusion, across outlets, presenting a united, attacking narrative. It is a genuine case of fake news, propaganda, a constructed spin on events.

Leigh Alexander is number 2 on Deepfreeze.it's list of shame with 23 ethical strikes against her. She double-booked her journalistic career with her work as a games consultant – a clear conflict of interest. She failed to disclose personal and financial relationships with numerous people that she promoted and wrote articles about. She was a member of Gamejournopros, despite lying about not being on the list. She viciously attacked writer Anne Rice, Youtuber Totalbiscuit and others. She threatened to blacklist people and end their careers. She engaged in and encouraged doxxing. She admitted deliberate bias and contempt for journalistic ethics and has made arguably racist statements while claiming to be progressive and anti-racist. A pattern repeated consistently amongst Social Justice Warriors.

This was the person leading the charge against Gamergate? Dismissing their concerns about journalistic ethics in games media? You could scarcely have chosen a worse person to defend games media against the charges being made.

I remember reading these articles as they came out. I didn't get angry, at least not so much as many people did. Rather I got sad. An enthusiast press should be making informed criticisms of its art form, not attacking it by agenda as these did. To have so many outlets working together to attack their audience – and by extension, their hobby – should have been unthinkable.

Gamejournopros Exposed

JournoList[115] was a private Google group for journalists, founded in 2007 and closed in 2010 after it was exposed and criticised. This was a list of some 400 journalists, academics and others with a left-wing slant. There is nothing inherently wrong with that of course, people with shared interests and shared careers talk all the time. The problem – as leaks from it exposed – was it being particularly nasty in its discussion and treatment of its ideological opponents. It was also exposed as being involved in a cross-media collaboration to promote US Democratic Party talking points and perspectives. 'The News' still isn't supposed to be so brazenly partisan and the list was, quietly closed after this exposure.

Political commentator Tucker Carlson described what he saw in leaks from the group like this:

“That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organisations they work for should stop pretending, too.”

This was a pretty big scandal at the time. While there was an argument over what it meant and spirited attempts to defend it, it was ultimately shut down and the alleged practices, at least, were agreed not to be 'playing the game' in the manner that they should.

JournoList was the model for Gamejournopros, the existence of which was first exposed by Milo Yiannopoulos on Breitbart but confirmed by list member Kyle Orland. Gamejournopros wasn't as important, of course, being limited to games journalism, but about Gamergate's issues, it would prove to be incredibly important.

Discussion on the list included talk about using the controversy around Quinn and ethical issues to give her 'game' more exposure. It also contained pressure to censor discussion of the issue on site fora, to spread the ideas behind the 'Gamers are Dead' articles and to blacklist Allistair Pinsof, formerly of Destructoid. It also exposed close links with PR firms and numerous other ethically grey, if not necessarily 'black' actions.

This confirmed what many had suspected – and previously levelled at Silverstring Media – that there was collusion, that people were working to create a narrative and that it was a 'conspiracy'. It confirmed that there was blacklisting, and that pressure was being used to censor discussion. It showed that the ongoing story of Gamergate was being presented in an entirely one-sided way, on purpose.

Silverstring Media

Silverstring Media has come up a couple of times now, and it's worth making a quick diversion to explain who and what they are.

Silverstring Media is an intensely ideological PR company, heavily tied to a lot of the 'critics' and anti-gamergate journalists, as well as indie games designers who are broadly part of the same 'cabal'. While not necessarily propagated by them regarding the articles, the 'Gamers are Dead' concept was one they had pushed in the past. That, along with their games journalist links made them a leading suspect as a source of collusion until Gamejournopros was exposed.

Silverstring are, frankly, terrifying. Their ideological fanaticism is utterly fringe and very deep rooted. Leaks exposing them were anonymous, but seem to have been confirmed. They include spooky observations such as:

“This PR group Sarkeesian is tied to is fairly creepy. Heavily ideological, they hold retreat workshops for SJW concepts, with a sharply activist tone. Reminds us of Jesus Camp. They do workshops for game devs where they discuss 'dismantling hegemonic masculinity in the gaming industry', and do weird training activities like 'State Torture Jenga'. 'Hegemonic masculinity' - it's like they're quoting Gramsci's prison notebooks. Creepy.”

This is the ideologically biased and absolutist language one expects from a cult, not a PR firm.

They're attached to Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency, amongst others.

Bring Back Bullying

A seemingly small thing, an example of the bad faith of journalists, blew up in Gawker's face and was the main contributor to Gamergate's part in its downfall. Gawker journalist Sam Biddle tweeted out the following in two posts, during the dust-up.

“Ultimately Gamergate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades; nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission. Bring back bullying.”

Along with him, fellow Gawker journalist at feminist hate-site Jezebel offered a $10,000 reward for pictures of a Gamergate supporter they'd deign to fuck.

Others began to pile on.

This public display of bias and hatred was bad enough, but Biddle turned out to be advocating bullying and harassment during National Bully Prevention Awareness Month.

It was a spectacular own goal in a huge number of ways, even more so as more anti-gamergate journalists – and others – began to pile on, displaying the very (alleged) behaviour they had been criticising Gamergate for. In response, Gamergate donated over $16,000 to an anti-bullying charity and, not long after, instituted the Gamergate Harassment Patrol. This took an internal stand against trolling, doxxing and harassment, getting a huge number of such accounts banned - amongst other accomplishments.

These were journalists who should have been investigating the issues and getting to the truth. Instead, they participated in cheap point scoring and advocated for bullying and social shaming at the worst possible time to do so. Gamergate turned that into aid for a charity and increased its efforts to deal with genuine issues and to confound its false, negative image.

This was, of course, barely reported.

SPJ & Airplay

From almost the beginning of Gamergate, Gamers were citing the Society of Professional Journalists' standards for ethical journalism as a goal, and as examples of how those standards were being breached by games journalists. It was a common talking point, running right through Gamergate. When various outlets did concede to changing (or even just enforcing) their ethical standards, Gamergate cheered.

When the SPJ held a conference and used a hashtag on Twitter to coordinate people who were present there, Gamergate leapt onto the hashtag en masse. They dumped a huge amount of information about what was going on around Gamergate and tried to engage as many people as possible. Many involved with the conference were confused and had no idea what was going on, others were lied to and encouraged to sign up to block bots by anti-Gamergate

Some listened.

Maverick journalist Michael Koretzky became the most engaged person from the SPJ, excited and happy to see that so many people – many of them young – were so engaged with the idea of journalistic ethics. Koretzky engaged with the tag, asked questions, listened, then helped to organise a 'fair shake' for Gamergate at a second SPJ conference, a pair of panels – morning and afternoon – called AirPlay.

The panel participants could have been better chosen, and there was still a comprehension problem on the part of the SPJ, requiring a lot of explanation and background that ate up a lot of time. Still, there was, an eventual agreement that yes, the games journalists being pointed at by Gamergate were breaching the ethical standards of the profession by having – and not declaring – their incestuous friendships, romances, financial and other ties.

Perhaps more interesting is that despite precautions, forewarning and security awareness, the meeting received a bomb threat. This was not the only time threats, and misrepresentations would be used to try and deny Gamergate from meeting. Similar threats were claimed by anti-Gamergate groups. It is likely in both cases these were third party trolls and not dangerous, but what was interesting was that only the threats made against Gamergate were considered credible by law enforcement [117][118][119].

Despite these disruptions AirPlay went ahead, even continuing outside after the building had to be cleared. People's determination to continue their meeting and discuss the points related to it even drew praise from journalists at the broader SPJ conference, some of whom had been war correspondents[120].

Reforms

Some are dismissive of what Gamergate achieved, but it did accomplish a great deal in cleaning up Games media and in changing the environment around games reporting. This is not insignificant. It's worth pausing, today, in 2017, to consider – in retrospect – what changed.

1. Affiliate links on many sites were forced to be more visible.

2. Disclaimers and corrections were posted on existing attack articles against Gamergate, exposing links (such as those between Jenn Frank and Zoe Quinn in a Guardian article). Conflicts of interest and proper disclosures were also flagged up or edited in.

3. Ethics policies were enforced and updated.

4. Gamergate used their opposition's tactics, successfully, to apply economic pressure to games sites acting in bad faith.

5. Games such as Hatred and Huniepop were protected from censorship.

6. It helped The Fine Young Capitalists complete their goal to help women in gaming.

7. Multiple resignations or 'retirements' of bad-faith games journalists, noted for ethical breaches occurred.

8. Over a hundred thousand dollars was raised for various charities.

9. Policies around Patreon and Crowdfunding were clarified or enacted.

10. Youtubers and other alternative outlets adopted public ethical policies.

Perhaps most importantly and of the most impact, the FTC in America revised its rules regarding affiliate links and sponsored articles. Something of importance to all Internet users, not just Gamergate people [121].

Beyond even that there was now an engaged and activated audience of gamers determined to protect the free expression of developers and the rights of consumers. There was now a massive 'all seeing' watchdog for the games industry that was constantly looking for any impropriety and putting it on blast.

Clickbait & Gawker

The ascent of click-bait seems to have stalled somewhat as people become more suspicious and more resentful of being lied to. During the main years of Gamergate, however, it was very much still a thing. Few sites were more notorious for pursuing click bait than Gawker and its collection of subsites (Jezebel, io9 and Kotaku in particular, when it came to games).

Gawker's model was entirely devoted to clicks, and they were willing to ignore laws, accuracy and even common decency in pursuit of clicks and the advertising revenue that would follow. This would ultimately lead to the downfall of Gawker and the selling off of its assets after losing its legal fight with Hulk Hogan[122].

The click-bait model favours outrage, antagonism, catastrophizing, overstatement and setting people at each other's throats. It's easier to create a click-bait article that angers people than one that delights them. If you can get two sides fighting – especially in the comments – or linking to your article (whether to support or condemn) your hits, and your money, are going to go up.

In the climate leading up to Gamergate this attitude, prevalent across Internet media and news, was favouring the 'critics' and their spurious claims of sexism, racism and so forth. Such a story was bound to attract annoyed and incensed gamers, but also militant ideologues to defend the accusations. That was a recipe for flame-war after flame-war and increased partisanship between the two sides. It may also have driven the willingness of individual sites to indulge ideological criticism and attacks on their hobby. There was money in it and, up until Gamergate, the mobbing only came from one side.

The Gawker-owned (at the time) site Kotaku was very much at the centre of a lot of the early Gamergate issues. At the time it was playing host to Nathan Grayson, the initial source of the conflict of interest in the 'Quinnspiracy' precursor to Gamergate. Kotaku had a long history of click-bait and deliberately controversial articles had multiple journalists as part of Gamejournopros and repeatedly attacked Gamergate.

Even before Gamergate Kotaku was hated by many gamers, not only for its seeming ideological bias but for other actions it had taken. One example was the treatment of Brad Wardell, printing stories about a spurious sexual harassment suit that he was found innocent of, leaving an online trail that continues to cause him issues[123].

Its involvement in the initial controversies, Gamejournopros and continuous and ongoing attacks on Gamergate made Kotaku, Gawker, a prime target for Gamergate and the main site to be targeted and harmed by Operation Disrespectful Nod.

Gamergate's detractors have cited the attacks on Gawker and Kotaku, via their advertisers, as a case of hypocrisy by Gamergate regarding its anti-censorship position. While I had concerns about boycotts and going after advertisers in this way, for that reason, that doesn't seem quite so applicable when it comes to Gawker and Kotaku. While there were ethical issues on other sites that were targeted, some of them were relatively minor. Unlike those, Kotaku tended to make excuses for behaviour such as Grayson's and had to be forced harder to introduce ethical standards. As a part of Gawker, they were also tied up into illegal activity, as well as ethical breaches. In these cases, it's not really what is being said – and not so much a free speech issue – but moral, ethical and legal failings against which sanction would seem to be more justified.

Media Stupidity

Another huge problem with the media, and one that became ever more apparent through Gamergate was that they simply didn't know what they were doing or saying. There was no real understanding of Internet culture; there was a reliance upon the word of the games media. There was virtually no effort to reach out to Gamergate, and they repeatedly took everything that they were told at face value by Gamergate's supposed victims. Not only that but they were repeatedly and successfully, spectacularly, trolled. Something that goes on to this very day and even happens on gaming related sites which, if anyone at all, should know better.

Gamergate may have been the beginning of awareness about this, but it has since reached absurd heights. The apex, so far, of 'not getting it' was the furore over Pepe during the 2017 US election. A simple cartoon frog, turned into many, many memes, was transformed into a hate symbol by nothing more than the paranoia and stupidity of the American 'left', turning them into figures of fun. Trolls further managed to confuse news outlets into believing that the 'OK' hand gesture was, somehow, a white supremacist symbol[124] and this trend has only continued.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this, related to Gamergate, was the case of Veerender Jubbal.

Veerender was a game critic, vocal against Gamergate and also noteworthy for a high volume of racist, anti-white tweets. When Paris was attacked trolls photoshopped a picture of him and circulated it, including some Gamergate supporters, claiming the image was of one of the attackers[125]. Bad taste, perhaps, but the media picked up on and circulated the image uncritically, despite it being a rather obvious Photoshop, despite him being a Sikh and despite a great big dildo having been inserted into the background.

This not only 'punished' Veerender for slandering gamers and racism, but it also exposed the media's amateurishness and – as this prank was accused of being racist – laid bare the hypocrisy of many Social Justice activists.

I remember trying to engage with Jubbal, in my usual fairly reasonable but uncompromising way, trying to call him on his inaccuracies and racism. I was blocked in short order, a pattern we see throughout these discussions.

Gamergate Vs Revolt Vs Baphomet Vs Trolls

When it suits them, the media can discern between extremists, breakaway groups and the main body of any particular movement. Also, when it suits them, they are completely unable to do this self-same thing. This largely depends on their political slant – as we run into it in the regular media. If your group seems acceptable, you'll get more leeway than otherwise.

For example, right wing media and talk radio will leap on any opportunity to connect Black Lives Matter with threats to and attacks on police. They will also look for any excuse to dismiss such accusations made against 'lone wolf' far right shooters.

In reverse, the left wing media will look for any excuse to dismiss Islam as a cause for terrorism and will blow up the smallest far-right incident far beyond the relative scale of its seriousness. Both sides will use individuals to tar wholes when it suits them, and excuse the whole from actions of minority subgroups when they prefer.

As an amorphous, leaderless movement – a hashtag and set of fora in which just about anyone could post – it was easy for bad actors to masquerade as Gamergate. That isn't to say that there weren't bad actors in Gamergate. Just regarding sheer scale, it's almost certain there were, but this is true of just about any large scale group. Most of the time people understand that these fringes do not represent the whole – unless they have an agenda to push. The fact that trolls, that anyone, could use the tag did give Gamergate's enemies plenty of ammunition, even if it wasn't truly Gamergate.

That, at least, would take a modicum of skill or effort to decipher (a couple of clicks to look at someone's profile perhaps) but there were other instances that underlined the media's lack of understanding. Just as, previously, groups like Anonymous were referred to as '4chan', in the case of Gamergate whole boards – 8chan in this instance, were accused of 'being Gamergate'.

It became rapidly apparent that the media couldn't understand the nature of image boards or that different sections were, essentially, different communities (albeit with some crossover). Accusing a whole board because of one bad actor in one subset is like arresting everyone on a street because one guy – at number 12 – turned out to be a terrorist.

There was a dedicated 'attack board' on 8chan called Baphomet which was devoted to genuine harassment and doxxing. This was not, in any way, the same as the Gamergate boards on that site, yet was repeatedly cited as evidence of Gamergate-based harassment. Evidence was that they – and other trolling and attack groups – were going after both sides, fairly indiscriminately, though targets guaranteed to freak out were more frequent on the anti-Gamergate side.

Similarly, when outcast by the rest of Gamergate for their actions and craziness, 'Gamergate Revolt' was set up. It was a tiny splinter of far right and conspiracy theory nuts that were no longer part of the movement. Still, their insanity and bad actions were used to smear Gamergate as a whole. These were the people who referred to the majority of Gamergate fixed on the real concerns of censorship and ethics as 'ethics cucks'. You can find the sad remnants of their group on endchan.

The mix of activism, ignorance and laziness was extremely harmful to the mainstream image of Gamergate and, more broadly, should make us all concerned about the quality of our news. If media outlets are relying on Wikipedia, getting one-sided points of view and making assumptions without investigation, how can we rely on their information about anything?

It has become something of a game, now, to lure the media in to believing something nonsensical and taking it seriously. During Gamergate's battles with its opponents, both the media and those opponents grasped at every straw to try and discredit Gamergate as a hate movement. One of the more egregious examples of this was Jace Connors[126]. Connors, a rather unfunny Internet comedian of the cringe variety, posted an unhinged Youtube rant directed against anti-Gamergate personality Brianna Wu. Wu, of course, took this seriously – or pretended to – and parts of the media followed her cue. It was such an obvious troll it beggared belief that anyone would take it seriously, but it was far from the only one. Other figures had taken – and continue to take – the Navy Seal Copypasta[127] as a serious threat against their life.

These mistakes are a source of hilarity to those who know and understand the Internet – like Gamergate – but with so many people being unfamiliar with Internet and Gamer culture, many take these things at face value. The Internet may be part of broader culture now, but it is still its space, with its own rules, memes and ways of expressing itself and it is vulnerable to being misunderstood by those not steeped in that culture. There's also a big difference between people who use the Internet and people who live there.

Chapter Six: Harassment, Violence & Censorship

Perhaps the biggest swirl of controversy around Gamergate was centred on the question of whether it was a harassment campaign and whether that harassment campaign was racist, sexist, misogynist and so forth. Many seemed to think that it was some outpouring of grief by 'cishetwhitemale' gamers at being intruded upon and losing a position of power.

Needless to say, I do not believe that it was and I think it can be shown that it was not. Still, despite that, people on all sides did suffer some genuine harassment, and it is all but impossible to tell, in many cases, where that harassment came from.

That this was allowed, and used to derail the possibility of debate and détente was one of the greatest tragedies of the whole affair for me. It was wrong that Gamergate had to constantly swat down these accusations and demonstrate their bona-fides while their opposition did not, despite much more visibly doing harm. There are – and remain – genuine discussions and debates to be had about corruption, ethics, censorship, diversity and 'safety' on the Internet.

Perhaps one day we can have those conversations. Recently there have been some signs that the two sides – in a more general sense – are becoming willing to talk. I hope it succeeds.

Was Gamergate a Harassment Campaign?

So much of the anti-Gamergate narrative hinges on the idea that was a harassment campaign, that it was, somehow, conceived of entirely to harass female and minority developers. This beggars belief from the get-go, the idea that tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, just got up one day and decided to attack women in gaming because reasons. Under closer examination, it would seem to fail as well.

The reasons for the reactions to Quinn, and others were not based – once we got into Gamergate – on their gender, but their bad actions and their irrational activism. As things progressed, the continued exploitation of Gamergate for pity and publicity furthered soured gamers towards people like Quinn and Sarkeesian, and it was constantly and consistently their actions and ideology that caused the reactions. It was never anyone's gender, race or other minority status.

Definitions

Regarding semantics, harassment is 'aggressive pressure and intimidation', it is also implied that it has to be ongoing. Legally speaking, in the UK, it is taken to mean 'repeated, unwanted, imposed communications and contact'. It must be both sent and received as harassment and must be oppressive and – perhaps most importantly – unreasonable. Both individuals and groups can be harassed under this definition, but there are examples – such as a doctor being subjected to repeated negative assertions – that were not considered harassment as they could be easily dismissed.

It also does not seem to be harassment when you are drawing attention to someone's wrongdoing or arguing with them. It is not harassment to disagree with someone or to say that they 'suck'. It would be libel (or slander, depending on context) to accuse someone of something if it were untrue, but not if it were true – or seemed to be true to a reasonable person.

Harassment, then, is something rather particular. Argument, disagreement – even en masse – cannot reasonably be construed to be harassment. When you have engaged in bad actions, when you are or have become a public figure, and you participate in controversial topics and ideological posturing, opposition cannot – usually – be considered harassment. To accuse an entire group of such a particular crime by the supposed and unproven actions of a minority of that group also does not seem reasonable.

Evidence

So what evidence is there for or against harassment by Gamergate?

It is entirely true that Gamergate has argued with journalists, 'critics' and others involved in nepotism, corruption and spreading falsehoods. It is also true that the group as a whole made significant efforts to spread knowledge of its purpose and to challenge people involved in poor actions.

It is understandable, from some points of view, why those challenges might be taken – or at least characterised as harassment. When you are one person being challenged by thousands of people, this can also be overwhelming. All of this was merely down to Gamergate's nature as an emergent, disorganised protest, not deliberate acts of harassment or dog-piling. This was no more mob harassment than a hundred letters sent to a TV station after a brief flash of nipple is.

Others point to the beginning of Gamergate as some evidence of harassment. They claim Gamergate to be all about harassing Quinn, at the behest of her 'harassing ex-boyfriend'. This is, of course, a 'poisoning the well' fallacy and, as we have already covered in this book does not reflect either the origin nor the ongoing nature of Gamergate. That assessment also doesn't relate what happened. Indeed so irrelevant did Quinn become to Gamergate, despite the insistence of its opposition, that a nickname 'Literally Who?' was coined to underline her virtual irrelevance.

Despite this, the claims of harassment persisted and are still repeated to this day, even though the statistical evidence doesn't support this narrative. The Women Action Media report into Gamergate harassment demonstrated that less than 0.66% of supposedly Gamergate related accounts (on a list that was meant to be the worst of the worst) were engaged in harassment. Most likely less than this amount, given the loose criteria for being a 'Gamergate account'[128].

Newsweek did their investigation into alleged Gamergate harassment which, on the surface, appeared slightly more damning. A statistician associated with Gamergate dug into it, examined its methodology and results and found that it painted quite a different picture to the one being claimed[129]. It showed that for all Gamergate – understandably – engaged with its critics and cultural enemies; it was twice as engaged with exactly the topics it said it was. Ethics and censorship. A lot of other posts were communications, 'shitposting' (just posting memes and nonsense) and internal communication.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the FBI exonerated Gamergate in their report into harassment and threats supposedly made against some of the chief figures in anti-Gamergate[130]. None of these threats were found to be credible, and none were linked to Gamergate – while threats made against Gamergate were found to be credible, separate to this report.

Given the size and openness of Gamergate, there's little doubt that some genuine harassment occurred on the part of 'true' members. I've run into bad actors within Gamergate myself (or at least formerly in Gamergate and then in breakaway groups like Gamergate Revolt and others). Nonetheless, on the weight of the evidence, it is simply not credible to call Gamergate harassers or to damn the whole thing as some misogynistic hate group. The evidence simply isn't there, quite the contrary.

Gamergate Harassment Patrol

Gamergate made a huge amount of effort to counter the harassment narrative being spun about it. They shouldn't have had to, as there was no evidence, but the accusations were effective and did create problems for the movement as a whole. None of these counter-efforts made that much difference to the narrative. In the same way that NotYourShield were dismissed as sock puppets, internalised misogynists and Uncle Toms (by white, male, middle-class hipster SJWs) so the Gamergate Harassment Patrol was similarly dismissed or ignored, even blamed.

The point of the GGHP, started by Allsailhatan, was to collectivise reporting of genuinely abusive behaviour and trolling on Twitter. Attention would be brought to such conduct, and the AHP would then mass report it, 'gaming' the Twitter report system at the time to help ensure that action was taken.

This was incredibly successful in dealing with a great many trolls and abusers who were trying to latch onto or exploit the tag but, as mentioned before, it did no good. As a result, the effort began to fall away as their efforts weren't being recognised and they were being blamed for harassment as well as being undermined from within Gamergate by the free speech extremists. Why labour so much on behalf of your enemies when they won't acknowledge your effort or apologise for implicating you in mass harassment?

Still, this demonstrates a genuine – and successful – effort by Gamergate to prove their good faith and to take collective action against actual harassers, even if it was ignored.

Trolling

Trolling is a venerable institution online, going back at least as far as Usenet. The term's usage has changed over that time, but Internet veterans and people steeped in Internet culture still use it in its original meaning. I would define that as:

“The practice of creating – usually insincere - provocative posts online to garner an emotional reaction and create controversy.”

For example, back in the day, you might have gone onto a Christian newsgroup on Usenet and posted a polemic in favour of abortion, then sit back and wait for the reaction. Trolls 'win' by creating that emotional reaction in people and the bigger the reaction, the more they win. They also win by fooling people into taking the ridiculous seriously.

Trolls are often attracted to drama. In situations where people are already arguing and fighting with one another, they're far more vulnerable to trolling and far more willing to take extreme points of view at face value. This is especially true if it paints the enemy in a bad light. They're also far more willing to go along with extreme points of view expressed, or apparently expressed, by their side.

'Troll' has also become a go-to insult used to dismiss anyone who disagrees with you, as noted by Richard Dawkins[131]. It is not, truly, that difficult to discern a troll from a sincere dissenter. Mistakes will be made, but it usually takes only a few interactions, or a couple of clicks to discern the real nature of a troll account. Dismissing those dissenters on the grounds of being a 'troll' is a cheap, dismissing tactic. Equally bemusing is when people take obvious trolls seriously, as an excuse to push their agenda.

The tactic for dealing with trolls has always been 'don't feed the troll'. In short, if you don't reply to them and don't give them attention then they get nothing out of it, and they drift away. This works. It is the only way of dealing with trolls that doesn't compromise the free Internet. Other methods of dealing with trolling tend to rely on compromising the things that make the Internet such a powerful and free place, anonymity for example. Despite this, there has increasingly, and for some time, been push-back against this sage advice, particularly from feminist commentators and those pushing to censor and control the Internet[132].

Even worse, the high speed, click-driven, attention economy of the current news cycle has made a paradise for trolls. The media are looking for absurd and extreme points of view to parade on the social media freak show in hopes of going viral. This has, increasingly, resulted in even credible news companies being taken for a ride[133].

Even worse still, there is increasingly a tendency for commentators and columnists to engage in 'symbiotic trolling'. Rather than 'don't feed the troll' people seeking an adverse reaction parade their weaknesses and buttons to be pushed in public. They write deliberately nasty and provocative articles (essentially trolling or 'baiting' themselves) and then reap the adverse and troll reactions as justification and to draw more attention and sympathy. This is a kind of extreme version of Lewis' Law – itself already logically invalid. Sadly, this troll-farming works, even when the trolls are exposed as the insincere, pathetic human beings that they are[134].

Needless to say, the Gamergate controversy attracted a lot of trolling against all sides. It was perfect as an environment for the trolls to operate in. People were angry in large numbers about things they genuinely cared about, it was all over the Internet and getting into the media – maximum potential exposure. It even began to create law enforcement reactions at an even larger scale, further spurring trolls to up their game.

Gamergate found itself, in no small part, in conflict with what might be termed '3.5 wave feminism'. Gamergate was ruthlessly egalitarian and truly diverse in just about every way, while this emergent new wave of feminism was – and is – steeped in a victimhood culture. It acts as though the world is just as dangerous for women as it was in the 1950s. It's also characterised by 'ironic misandry', sexism, racism and other bigotry – just against culturally acceptable targets.

An online feminist or other social activist might as well be shooting up a flare asking to be trolled and then explaining, in detail, exactly how to best get them into a tizzy. Trolls and bullies will home in on whatever weakness you might have. If you're fat they will call you fat, if you're gay, they'll use homophobic insults, if you're black they'll call you a nigger. It's all meaningless, they're just going for whatever will make you lose it, but the art of discerning trolls and understanding that's what they're about, seems to have been lost.

Those opposing Gamergate repeatedly took trolls seriously – when it suited them - dismissed honest interlocutors as trolls – when it suited them – and blamed Gamergate for every anonymous troll that ever called them names. It was thoroughly dishonest, and even when this disingenuous treatment of trolling was exposed (such as Jace Connors), somehow nothing changed. If anything the trolling was taken even more seriously. Even entirely spurious and hyperbolic death threats from anonymous trolls were taken seriously, used to justify police bodyguards and increased security measures for people like Anita Sarkeesian even with no credible threats[135].

The trolling around Gamergate was, perhaps, the thing that most derailed the movement and gave its opponents the most ammunition in the public eye, frustrating as this was for people that understand the Internet. It allowed Gamergate to be mischaracterized as a hate group to people who didn't understand the Internet. It allowed trolls to just drop the tag into whatever they did to stir the pot, knowing people would take it seriously and spread it around.

Trolls can, however, 'use their powers for good'. High profile trolling – such as that done by Godfrey Elfwick and similar – has exposed problems with the news media, their dishonesty, credulity and lack of research. People involved in Gamergate also used trolling tactics to expose genuine abuse – as we'll discover later. Most recently a furore around Far Cry 5 was revealed, entirely, as a trolling effort. That, in turn, exposed double standards in game criticism especially about race issues[136]. Shockingly, nobody learned from this, and the same trolling effort was seemingly repeated about news of a new Wolfenstein game[137]. All of this despite protests about Resident Evil 5's African setting being taken seriously[138]. Similar accusations have dogged previous Far Cry games, despite their exotic settings and strong, ethnic supporting casts, perhaps the reason Ubisoft chose white Americans for their villains this time around.

I mostly find trolling tiresome, since it gets in the way of discussion. I'm pretty good, if not infallible, at detecting trolls and know enough to mute rather than block them. The devaluing of the term to mean anyone who disagrees with you, it's use to dismiss honest and sincere arguments is the worst part. While trying to engage honestly and sincerely I, myself, have often been called a troll. I think it merely salves people's consciences and egos to be able to dismiss anyone and everyone this way, especially if they have good arguments. Genuine harassment is a terrible thing that I've been on the sharp end of as well, to conflate that with trolling seems utterly disingenuous.

Sock Puppets

Sock Puppeting is creating fake accounts, in addition to your main account. People use these kinds of accounts for all sorts of things. Unscrupulous authors, podcasters and video makers use sock puppet accounts to boost their review counts and vote up their content. Political movements can be astroturfed and made to seem more popular by legions of fake accounts. It has even been suggested that intelligence organisations use legions of sockpuppet accounts in comment sections and on social media to try and manipulate public opinion, something leant more credibility by social experiments on Facebook.

About Gamergate, people within the movement were constantly accused of using or being sock puppet accounts, especially regarding the NotYourShield tag. It seemed that anti-Gamergate simply refused to believe that any 'marginalised' people could take up against them. They couldn't seem to comprehend that there were people – of minority status – who felt represented, didn't care about representation, or who just wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.

This forced women and minorities associated with Gamergate to 'out' themselves by posting photos, which in turn made them more vulnerable to being doxxed and otherwise attacked by their opponents. The idea behind this dismissal, 'internalised misogyny', or calling people 'Uncle Toms', relates to the Marxist idea of 'false consciousness'[139]. This is the patronising (if occasionally valid) idea that people don't know what's good for them. That they act against their self interest. Regarding the minorities in Gamergate, it was more to do with a focus on egalitarianism and meritocracy amongst their number. This not that surprising in a community that has always been welcoming, and in which 'git gud' is the catchphrase for anyone trying – and failing – to beat a game.

Rather than tackle the opposing viewpoint in any meaningful way, it was much easier to pretend these people weren't real. When they proved themselves to be real, it was far simpler to marginalise them – ironically – or to threaten their jobs and positions[140]. The hate they got was far more real and far more palpable than that alleged to be going the other way.

Meanwhile, there were at least a few confirmed cases of anti-Gamergate people fabricating abuse against themselves, especially when they messed up and forgot to log into different accounts. One of the chief examples of this was Brianna Wu, who posted a steam thread harassing herself, later removed and also, later, claimed to be sarcastic self-deprecation. Nobody bought that excuse, and it helped highlight how being abused and harassed online was becoming a cottage industry, chasing 'pity bucks' and publicity off the back of it. We've seen similar problems bleeding out of internet conflicts into the real world, where a disappointing lack of genuine bigotry seems to lead people to create it themselves, the ends justifying the means[141].

Paedophiles and Sex Criminals, Everywhere

One of the top accusations against Gamergate was that it was a misogynistic, sexist hate group that was a danger to women. On that basis Gamergaters were barred from hosting panels at conventions, asking questions, cosplaying and even mentioning Gamergate when present at conventions. A lot of these accusations came from fairly prominent male feminists embedded in journalism, social media and the Social Justice organisations that took such issue with Gamergate.

The only crime – so far as I am aware – to be linked to Gamergate was when Ethan Ralph of the Ralph Retort (a muckraking website that parasitically exploited Gamergate) woke up from a drunken stupor and punched a policeman. Ralph had already long been disowned from the majority of Gamergate – despite producing some useful exposés from time to time, and most Gamergaters had distanced themselves from him[142]. Still, an act of drunken stupidity on the part of one individual is not especially damning.

On the other hand, a particular pattern of behaviour has emerged amongst Gamergate critics, to the point where – if the crimes hadn't been so horrible – it could be seen as a dark joke.

Time after time Gamergate's Social Justice critics have been outed or arrested as sex offenders [143].

- Delon Richmond, a moderator for Anita Sarkeesian's Twitch channel, was revealed to be a convicted Paedophile [145].

- Devin Faraci, a movie reviewer, decried Gamergate as being a bunch of basement-virgins who didn't know how to relate to women. He was forced to step down after it emerged he had sexually assaulted several women.

- Glenn Fleischman, an outspoken opponent of Gamergate, was accused of being a 'creeper' for bringing up his polyamorous open marriage, unbidden [144].

- Jamie Kilstein, a feminist writer and radio host who told his listeners that Gamergate was about sexism and not ethics. He was fired from his podcast after accusations of sexual abuse came out.

- Juan Thompson, who once wrote for The Intercept, wrote an article accusing Gamergate of being a hate group that targeted marginalised communities. He was later arrested for faking bomb threats in the name of his ex-girlfriend and was exposed for filing fake stories.

- Leland Yee, a former Democratic senator who had previously, frequently, accused games of encouraging violence and who had bandwagoned onto Anita Sarkeesian's crusade, ended up disgraced for bribery and arms trafficking. Not a sex-related accusation, but sufficiently ironic to be worth mentioning.

- Matt Hickey, a journalist who described Gamergate members as 'future rapists', turned out to be a serial rapist running a fake porn company.

- Nafedude, a very active and vicious anti-Gamergate slacktavist on Twitter publicly admitted to sexually assaulting his sister [146].

- Robert Maemolejo, a member of Zoe Quinn's Crash Override Network anti-harassment group, was accused of rape by twenty different women. He had previously accused many involved in Gamergate of being misogynists, sexist and anti-woman.

- Several anti-Gamergate male feminists were implicated in the attempted doxxing of Gamergate proponent 'Mombot'.

- Perhaps most notoriously of all, the prominent anti-Gamergate voice 'Sarah Butts' was outed as a software pirate and paedophile after they were investigated and chat logs were leaked [147].

Several of these have been marked by a sudden double standard from the professed 'listen and believe' attitude otherwise prevalent in Social Justice circles. Apparently one should not simply believe accusations without question after all, at least when it's someone you like or someone who claims a minority status.

Does this demonstrate that all of Gamergate are good, decent, law-abiding people or that all male feminists are secret rapists? Of course not, but it does show that, at least as far as these examples go, some people are covering for something and signalling virtue.

Just while I've been writing this book, yet another case has come out. 'Amir0x' a former moderator at the site Neogaf, and a vocal opponent of Gamergate has been arrested on charges of the possession of child pornography. As Gamergaters like to say, 'the ride never ends'.

Doxxing

Doxxing is the practice of releasing someone's personal details to expose them for their activities online. This can be their home address, their phone number, their work contact details, their family members, profiles and more. This opens people up to increased harassment, nuisance calls and even being fired from work for things said and done outside work, anonymously online. This last one is particularly harmful as businesses tend to react in a knee-jerk manner.

All sides had members who were doxxed during the height of Gamergate, but this primarily seems to have been done by third party trolls. Both sides publicly disavowed doxxing, but doxxing took place anyway. Some on both sides also endorsed doxxing, privately or semi-privately. This helped fuel some splits within Gamergate.

The Social Justice Warriors seemed to consider it a valid tactic in some instances, especially given the way they repeatedly went after people's jobs. Apparently, there were 'no bad tactics, only bad targets'[148]. Indeed, some of the most prominent anti-Gamergate people were discovered to be engaging in these very tactics through the CON leaks and ZachAttack.

Gamergate, through being much more steeped in an Internet culture of anonymity, was a great deal more angry about doxxing and very much against it. When Brianna Wu's dox were posted on 8chan, board members repeatedly spammed the conversation thread to push the information off the server. The Gamergate Harassment Patrol made doxxing a particular target of its actions. Those who engaged in or supported doxxing came in for massive condemnation by the majority of Gamergate and ended up splintering off into the more extreme 'Gamergate Revolt' as the rest of Gamergate would not tolerate them. A lot of doxxing and hacking seemed to stem from the non-Gamergate 'Baphomet' board – but Gamergate was made to carry the can for it, much to Baphomet's frequent delight.

For me, doxxing, and the controversy around it underlines the societal crisis we're facing as our public and private lives collide. People's social media profiles are being trawled by companies before they hire them. People are being fired over opinions expressed outside of work, on their own time, and their personal, ideological beliefs. This drives a desire and need for anonymity, but that anonymity can be exploited by genuine abusers. It seems to me that there needs to be a reassertion of the right to a private life and a division between your work life and personal life. It shouldn't matter whether someone is a sieg-heiling stormtrooper or a Starbucks-smashing Antifa so long as they don't hurt anyone while they're making you coffee.

Personal Censorship

I've experienced the harassment and wrath of the Social Justice Mob myself, even long before Gamergate. In 2012 I wrote a blog post entitled 'In Defence of Rape'. This, of course, wasn't defending the real, physical act of rape. Rather it was defending the use of rape in stories, games and other media as a topic for examination and dramatic use. I'd already been running into the nasty end of the Social Justice mob since around 2010, but this incident is what boiled it over. Before this, they had been a tiny fringe of lunatics that nobody worth a damn took seriously.

As a result of that blog, people put together petitions to have me fired or to deny me work from companies that had employed me freelance in the past. They accused me of being a rape apologist and even, at the height of the nonsense, of being a rapist. Completely without evidence.

I have no idea where that came from.

People who never knew me pretended they knew me and made up stories. All of this was uncritically believed. I got messages and emails threatening me and threatening to rape my wife and me to 'see how I liked it'. These were spurious trolls of course, but it was the kind of thing the people freaking out at me claimed to be against but unleashed on me.

“It's OK when we do it.”

People even went back through my old work, going back ten years or more, looking for anything and everything that could be interpreted – however uncharitably – as being questionable through a 'social justice' lens. Humour (however crude) was taken seriously, so long as it suited the narrative and they read all sorts of things into my writing that simply weren't there.

Ever since then everything I have ever done or said has been held under a microscope, and these spurious accusations have flared up time and time again. Whenever I have made satirical games or offered free material, it has been down-voted, given one-star ratings and ranted about. There are hate posts everywhere, and I have had material censored from sales outlets by outrage-merchants and pressure from other games companies. Possibly antitrust, but on a small publishing scale there's not a lot you can do about it.

All of this for merely defending the right of artists to have access to the full gamut of free expression. It's absurd, like insisting a painter isn't allowed to use 'burnt umber' in their paintings. It primed me to be sympathetic to Gamergate as they fought similar battles in similar arenas. I can tell you from personal experience that the things Gamergate was concerned about absolutely have merit, real harm is being done to many creative enterprises by the intrusion of politics and activism.

The Battle for Wikipedia

For all that the Internet is an incredible information resource, it has choke-points for information, commerce and news. These are places that a lot of people refer to and which are treated uncritically, or which have a disproportionate effect on opinion making. Amazon is such a choke point for commerce, Facebook and Twitter for social communication – which makes preventing censorship on those platforms very important. As a general purpose information source, there's Wikipedia.

For a (somewhat) openly editable resource, Wikipedia is incredibly well trusted. This isn't entirely without justification. For all that there is a lot of academic snobbery about Wikipedia it has consistently been found to be as, or more, accurate than other encyclopaedias[150]. This is, generally right, particularly when it comes to mathematics and scientific entries, but it breaks down completely when it comes to contentious social and political issues.

Needless to say, Gamergate was a contentious social issue.

Almost immediately from when an entry for Gamergate was created it began to run into problems from activist editors who deleted the initial stub. This kind of problem would continue with deletions of information related to the Gamejournopros list – supposedly related to 'notability'. Particularly dogged in biasing and attacking the article was the editor 'Ryulong' who wreaked havoc upon the article until finally being banned. He now appears to be the main admin for related articles over on the misnamed 'Rationalwiki' where his full bias is on show, without moderation or oversight.

In the aftermath of all the conflicts and editing wars over the 'Gamergate Controversy' page, it has been tied down and protected from open edits. It remains horrendously biased and given – sadly – that Wikipedia is the first stop for so many people, including journalists, it's bias and misrepresentation has a huge reach and impact.

- The Wikipedia article erroneously describes Gamergate as a harassment campaign.

- It claims that it specifically targeted women, which it did not.

- It conflates the anonymous trolling and abuse with Gamergate's objections and investigations.

- It offers none of the evidence or support links for Gamergate's issues, only for its enemies.

- It characterises Gjoni's 'Zoe Post' as a 'disparaging blog post' rather than a warning from a man escaping from an abusive relationship.

- It characterises Gamergate as right wing and reactionary, which does not fit the studies into Gamergate's politics.

The entire article is grotesquely slanted and even on the talk page criticism of its stance and bias has been deleted. It is a prime example of bias and activist editing – something that isn't uncommon[151]. The treatment of the Gamergate community in trying to correct the record on Wikipedia, the state of the article itself, it's moderation, and the ignoring of complaints has been in direct contravention of Wikipedia's stated principles[152].

The problems with this, the harm it has done to an innocent community, the knock-on effect of bad reporting and the damage it has done to Wikipedia's reputation across a vast swathe of the online community cannot be overstated.

Calgary Expo

Gamergate supporters have had all manner of issues relating to conventions and shows, largely down to the misapprehension that they are a 'hate group' or a 'harassment campaign'. Convention spaces have increasingly been bringing in 'anti-harassment policies' that have very little to do with harassment and a lot more to do with censorship and controlling content. Many of these policies are derived from the rather partisan and ideological example, found on the 'Geek Feminism Wiki'[153].

These policies are often extremely vague, intervene in matters best left to the police, and if enforced would ruin many events. The advent of these policies has been of concern to many attendees and exhibitors since they amount to carte-blanche ability of any convention attendee to make a spurious complaint and have you ejected without any investigation or oversight.

Speaking for myself, attending and displaying at a convention in London, I examined the new anti-harassment policy they had brought in and surveyed the show. If the policy had been enforced, many cosplayers would have been ejected, and about half of the stalls would have to have been closed due to the content of their products.

These problems go back further still, with tech conferences. In 2013 sex/security blogger Violet Blue had a talk cancelled at a conference due, simply, to the talk discussing sex, drugs, dangers, consent and surrounding issues. All it took was one attendee – who could have skipped the talk – complaining that they would be triggered, and it got pulled[154].

This brings us to the Calgary Expo.

The Honey Badger Brigade, a (mostly) female Men's Human Rights group had booked a stall at the show, seemingly without any problems. They had become associated with Gamergate through helping to publicise it and sharing some issues with Gamergate around bad publicity and being unable to get a fair shake in the media. They had merchandise combining their own 'badger' imagery with that of Gamergate mascot Vivian James and intended to attend panels on feminism and representation in geek media, to give an alternative point of view. They were also there to promote and sell the comic work of Honey Badger member Alison Tieman.

To start with it appeared there were no problems, though apparently there was some whispering and questioning when it came to their presence there. Nobody directly confronted them. Then they attended a panel and had the temerity to speak up – quite respectfully – and question the assumptions of a panel during the Q&A[155].

Despite the recording of the panel, despite not having done anything, they were then challenged the following day and told they had to leave. This was also, in part, due to an inaccurate, and frankly, libellous article in The Mary Sue[156].

While a convention has the right to throw people out for 'any reason' (as you'll find in most such small print) that 'any reason' is held to the legal standard that a 'reasonable person' would agree. Things are further complicated by the fact that the Calgary Expo was partially funded by public money. Publicly funded events being subject to different regulations about free speech and your right to attend. In any event, the Honey Badgers are now embroiled in a legal case against both the Calgary Expo and The Mary Sue, which is yet to finish working its way through the Canadian courts, at the time of publication[157].

The abuse of anti-harassment policies can, ironically, be considered harassment in and of itself. The fact that the Honey Badgers were expelled from a convention, simply for participating in (if disagreeing) with a panel is deeply concerning. Similarly many attempts to have panels and discussions about Gamergate have been disallowed or cancelled due to lobbying and spurious 'safety' concerns. The lack of debate, the lack of opportunity to present alternative points of view is a problem far bigger than just Gamergate.

While this book was being written a new convention controversy erupted after Youtube personality Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin) and many other anti-Social Justice Warrior critics attended a panel at Vidcon, the Youtube convention, that included Anita Sarkeesian. They were only there to listen and to, perhaps, ask questions during the Q&A but Sargon was subjected to abuse from Sarkeesian and those who tried to ask questions were ignored and even ejected. That Sarkeesian suffered no punishment or sanction for her breaking of the convention harassment policy indicates a double standard, which is another problem with these kinds of ad hoc regulations.

RedditRevolt & Youtube Censorship

The atmosphere around Gamergate has contributed to a much broader problem online and in social media around 'safety', 'harassment' and the seeming incompatibility between ideological, commercial and user desires. A skirmish that occurred alongside Gamergate that exemplified this clash was The Reddit Revolt[158].

The Reddit Revolt was a bucking against an unpopular firing and creeping censorship on the Reddit platform, a platform that had been set up and established on a free expression basis. When well-liked Reddit employee and force behind its popular 'Ask Me Anything' section, Victoria Taylor, was fired – for opaque reasons that immediately fell under suspicion.

As a protest at least 300 different subreddits 'went dark', reducing traffic and registering their disapproval of this being done. Victoria had been a face at Reddit that was visible and available to moderators, helping to prevent it from being a faceless company and making people feel cared for and valued.

In what many considered to be retaliation for this act of defiance, interim CEO Ellen Pao (perhaps more well known for starting a failed harassment suit[159]) began a crackdown on subreddits. This included many of those that had protested the firing. Many of these subreddits were what might be termed 'problematic', some genuinely vile, but Reddit had, until now, been as hands off as possible. Reddit had always been founded and rooted in the Internet culture of free expression, and a change to that was never going to go well. Pao, now being humorously referred to as 'Chairman Pao' by those arrayed against her, was trying to make Reddit more commercially viable, family friendly and 'safer' by cleaning house.

Needless to say, this was not what most Redditors wanted, and they rose up against her en masse, in a manner not dissimilar to Gamergate. Much as happened with Gamergate, Pao was defended with accusations of misogyny and 'tech-bro' directed at her critics. Strangely, when it came to Reddit, this didn't stick, and Pao left under a cloud, resigning (or possibly 'resigning') as the revolt amongst Reddit's userbase grew stronger and stronger, and it became apparent it wasn't going to work.

Similar issues around censorship and the balance between ideology, user base and commerciality have plagued Facebook and Twitter as well, with both tending to shift away from pleasing their userbase to trying to please commercial interests. Nowhere has this been more apparent, contemporary to the publication of this book, than on Youtube.

Youtube has become hugely important as video content has become more viable and ubiquitous with the spread of higher speed Internet on a larger scale basis. It has become a major platform, particularly for citizen journalists, commentators and alternative media. There are many commentators and alternative news sources on Youtube that have far higher subscriber counts and levels of engagement than professional, traditional news sources. It's not just make-up tutorials, narcissistic Instagram models and sneezing pandas. To many, this has been incredibly liberating, and for successful Youtube personalities, the ability to make money through advertising on Youtube allowed them to make it their full-time career.

While Youtube was always somewhat more constricted (disallowing adult content for example), it was, also, from its founding steeped in the same, anti-censorship Internet culture as Reddit and Twitter. It was an open platform for people to share, with the minimum of disruption and oversight. Over time that has changed, with the 'game' shifting and making old models of successful behaviour on Youtube fail and others rise. Nothing has been so devastating as the 'adpocalypse'[160] however.

According to somewhat irresponsible reports, advertising on Youtube was appearing next to 'extremist content' – though quite what amounts to 'extremist content' seems to be slightly contentious. The definition has varied from far-right channels and content to ironic racism and even men's rights proponents[161]. This is a hugely broad area of space to be labelled 'extreme'. Individual Youtube personalities have also come under attack. Most notably Youtube star Pewdiepie[162] for his edgy humour and use – in particular – of Fiverr to expose just how willing people were to do terrible, silly things for as little as five dollars.

Some of this appears to be jealously from the legacy media, unable to compete with or understand the rise of new media. Some of it seems to be a lack of understanding – failing to recognise that advertising is placed by an algorithm and does not imply endorsement. Some of it appears to be the same old pursuit of click-bait headlines.

Whatever the causes, the effect of these faux-concerns about safety, extremism and 'un-PC views' ha been devastating. The meaningless scandal sucked advertising money out of Youtube, dropping some channel's income from a respectable living to virtually nothing in the space of a handful of days [163].

This crisis has massively hit, in particular, current affairs channels, commentary and criticism channels, horror channels and many others. Youtube has gone from being an open platform to a massively over-curated platform that shies away from monetizing things on an absolute hair trigger. Hopefully, this will shake down over time, but it does illustrate exactly how harmful to a platform, and its user base, such panic-led censorship can be and how Gamergate's concerns are valid in a broader context.

CON Leaks & ZachAttack

So far we've mostly talked about the accusations made towards Gamergate, and the lack of evidence that Gamergate as a whole was involved in any genuine harassment, doxxing or threats. We haven't examined the threats and actions from the other side so much, save the history of Zoe Quinn.

As with the accusations made towards Gamergate, it's impossible to tell – a lot of the time – where the abuse coming the other way genuinely comes from due to Internet anonymity. Certainly, a lot of nastiness is attributable to various anti-Gamergate figures, because they were less shy of using their names and faces, secure in the power their position and ideology gave them. A lot of this back and forth, swearing, etc. is harmless and it would be as hypocritical to upbraid them for 'banter' as it was for them to uphold a double standard over it.

There are two cases, however, in which we have unimpeachable evidence of bad faith action on the part of people in the anti-Gamergate grouping.

The CON leaks are, perhaps, the biggest deal about Gamergate as a whole. CON – a little on the nose for an acronym – stands for 'Crash Override Network'. This was the supposed anti-harassment scheme and group set up by Zoe Quinn and friends to aid victims of online harassment. She likes to think she's the victim of harassment, rather than someone being called out for bad behaviour, so this sort of makes sense. Several people from Gamergate, being attacked by various groups, had tried contacting them for help and had been rebuffed. Other people – neutral – had gone to them for help and later complained about being given the cold shoulder because they weren't high profile enough. In the end, though, it was these leaks from a Skype group – confirmed as accurate by a member – that were most damning[164].

There's a lot to it and a lot to dig through. Some of the highlights from it do include, however:

1. Admission of sabotage regarding the Polaris Game Jam.

2. Attempts to frame the owner of 8chan as a paedophile.

3. Discussion of blacklisting and job sabotage.

4. Lying about the involvement of sexual harassers within their group.

5. Racism towards the Japanese.

6. Randi Harper engaging in doxxing of Gamergate members, supported by Katherine Cross.

7. Targeting of feminist game critic and presenter Liana Kerzner for being the wrong kind of feminist.

8. Threats of violence, harassment and more.

In short, everything they ever accused Gamergate of doing, they were engaged in themselves, and even under the auspices of a supposed 'anti-harassment group' while they were doing it. I got off relatively lightly personally, with nothing more than a dismissal of my depression and my suicide attempt, this from people who exhort everyone to 'listen and believe' to victims.

The ZachAttack[165] was something much more personal, but just as revealing. This was an elaborate sting operation set up by a Gamergate member called 'Mombot'. Mombot claims to be a Japanese woman, a medical translator and a mother. As a member of Gamergate, she has been something of a thorn in the side of anti-Gamergate for some time. As a woman and a racial minority (at least in the USA), her mere existence challenges the false narratives about Gamergate that they have spread. Whether Mombot genuinely is any of these things I couldn't tell you, but – perhaps emboldened by the exposure of Allison Prime as a catfish, anti-Gamergate decided to try and go after Mombot.

Multiple times Mombot came under attack and was told she was fake, some of her attackers claimed to know her 'real' identity. This struck her as hypocritical coming from supposed feminists and from people who claimed to be against harassment and doxxing. As a result, Mombot and another user named Rudderhouse set out to create a trap. One would ally themselves with anti-Gamergate and feed them false information, while Mombot would archive this information and release it once they tried to blackmail or dox her.

Over several months they built up a fake dossier called 'Zachary Miller', complete with an embarrassing social media presence. They fed this to the anti-Gamergate people they considered to be the nastiest and most over-eager to go on the offensive. Those targets fell for it hook, line and sinker.

In the wake of the CON leaks things were rather heated, and since Mombot had been amongst the first to publicise those leaks, she came in for rather concerted and vicious attack. It was in this context that the final step of the ZachAttack was triggered.

The anti-Gamergate group, including noteworthys such as Izzy Galvez (Internet abuse specialist at Amazon) and Palle Hoffstein (creative director at Ubisoft), went in for the kill. Mombot faked 'Twittercide' and deleted the fake accounts to make things seem more real.

The anti-Gamergate people celebrated their 'victory', but it was short lived as the truth came out and they were revealed as harassers and doxxers by a second set of leaks. In both of these instances there is direct, absolute proof of collusion, harassment and doxxing yet nobody appears to have lost their jobs or to have been disciplined for what they did. More double standards.

Meanwhile, there remains no evidence directly linking Gamergate to any genuine harassment. Something rather remarkable for what was an open hashtag that anyone could use.

Cashing In: From Milo to Sarkeesian

Depending who you ask, and when you ask them, Gamergate was either a tremendously important sociopolitical moment with implications reaching as high as US elections[166] or a meaningless Internet slap fight. Whichever way you look at it, it was ripe for exploitation while it was at its height, and it continues to pull people's attention. Gamergate has been amorphous and indistinct enough (at least in the mass media view) to fuel pre-existing narratives, to push ideology, to draw clicks and to be blamed (or lionised) for anything and everything. It's a great source of sympathy, outrage, virtue signalling and pandering – on all sides.

Gamergate's desperation for the faintest inkling of fair treatment, or to get its – genuine – message out there, also made it extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Despite warning about that, I was one of any number of people who let it slide for the sake of expediency. Even now, looking back, I'm not sure whether that was a mistake or not.

Milo & the New-Right

One of the main reasons Gamergate became – erroneously – connected with the right wing is down to the support and intervention of controversial, right-wing (and flamingly homosexual) journalist Milo Yiannpoulos. At the time Milo was working for right-wing mouthpiece Breitbart, a tiresome online Tabloid which, despite it's Turbo-Hitler rightward slant does, still, occasionally produce some useful journalism and commentary[167].

Whatever else you might think of Milo, he certainly has a nose for controversy and appears to have seen multiple opportunities for himself, Breitbart and the right wing in Gamergate. As a result, Breitbart was the first, and practically the only, site to give Gamergate a fair shake[168] and to provide it with consistent support, right up to the present day, in stark contrast to other outlets.

Now, this was very strange, especially given Gamergate's leftward slant in its membership and politics, but both Breitbart's wingnuts and Gamergate's activists both had issues with 'political correctness gone mad' and the anti-intellectual, anti-debate attitudes of Social Justice activists. There was a common cause in anti-censorship and free expression. Gamergate's objections might not necessarily have been towards the goals, but rather the methods. The right-wing's objections might have been both, but Gamergate and the populist right had a common enemy in the censorious, authoritarian left, and a common cause in more libertarian cultural attitudes. It's important to reiterate that this did not make Gamergate right wing and that's true of much of the online counter-culture, a mistake repeatedly made in the book 'Kill All Normies' by Angela Nagle.

Many of us in Gamergate were wary of this development – with good reason – but this was, ultimately, a beneficial circumstance for Gamergate, even though it got it tarred as right wing and reactionary. Gamergate was never going to win the hearts and minds of the Social Justice Warriors and their camp followers anyway. There was no real point courting them. The movement's willingness to align on a handful of issues, regardless of other politics, stood it in good stead and allowed it to accept support from the right without compromising its ideals. This also helped to expose its enemies.

However, Breitbart – and Milo – weren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or through a devotion to objective journalism. Milo could afford to be objective about Gamergate because it was arrayed against people that he regarded as the enemies of the right. He didn't need to agree with Gamergate to land a blow against their mutual enemies. Involvement with Gamergate was also a way to demonstrate to the outdated, old fashioned and ageing right-wing the importance of the online world. It also showed the appeal of a more libertarian (especially social) stance and the power of a more youthful, irreverent group.

It was utterly cringeworthy to see so many right-wing podcasters and talk-radio hosts suddenly bringing up games and trying to be 'down with the kids' though. Hideous pandering.

Milo, expertly, before his downfall[169], rode and exploited the Gamergate issue, amongst others, to boost his profile and to garner himself an engaged and supportive online audience. It appears to have been as much about self-promotion for him as any right-wing agenda. As he ascended he began to drop Gamergate, his book on the conflict seems like it will never appear, but he is now launching his independent career off the backs of Gamergate and his college tour. Including his book 'Dangerous'.

The right-wing, meantime, has indeed managed to engage much more successfully with the youth by presenting a more irreverent, culturally and economically libertarian viewpoint (that tends to resonate more with young people than classical conservatism). Embarrassingly, Paul Joseph Watson (Infowars) is probably right when he describes Conservatism as the new counter-culture[170]. While he's probably wrong when he describes it as the new punk rock, it does at least 'rhyme' with some punk sensibilities. With Johnny Rotten selling out to pimp butter to his ageing peer group, it's not such a stretch.

Populist conservatism may be enjoying something of a renaissance politically, but culturally, academically, educationally the field is almost entirely in the control of progressive – sometimes extremely progressive – viewpoints. Worse, these people still think of themselves as the rebels, and not as the establishment, while conservatives seem themselves – mostly – as the establishment, and not the rebels.

Internet culture's irony, fakery and 'fronting' makes it hard to work out what is serious and what isn't. Only those on the inside can decode what is truly meant. This can, unfortunately, provide cover for genuine bigots. Even if 90% of 4Chan's /pol/ board (politically incorrect, far-right seeming views) is ironic or for shock value, some of it is serious. An outsider, an uninitiated observer, has little or no chance of telling what is sincere or not. Further, those steeped in Internet culture who are not on the right have no compunction using and re-purposing right-wing memes or anti-semitic cartoons (such as the Happy Merchant) for other uses, without the baggage[171].

When people misunderstand this use of memes, it only makes them seem stupid and hopelessly outdated to anyone who is remotely in the know. To the extent 'meme magic' had any pull on the US election it was only this; making Hilary Clinton look hopelessly out of touch[172]. This same cluelessness, in other arenas, has helped feed the rise of the Alt-Right. This started out as – perhaps – something more of a libertarian alternative to the 'cucked' centre right and slid even more rightward as, ironically, it was accused of virtual (or literal) Nazism. At least that's how it occurred in the public eye. It is, perhaps, more accurate to say that there was a fight over the meaning of the term between the populist right and the far-right. The far-right won in the end, ironically with the help of the liberal media.

Gamergate may not have been right-wing as a whole, but parts of it were, and many people were pulled to the right by the sheer disingenuous nature of the media and Social Justice activists towards it. Meanwhile, the right certainly learned to tap into the online and youth spaces in a way that put their opposition to shame, and they acquired the skills of meme-making and 'shitposting'.

All of this was avoidable if only regular media outlets had given Gamergate a fair shake in the first place. So much of this was a monster of their making through their bias, their censorship and through the 'Gamers Are Dead' articles.

Brianna Wu

Brianna Wu is an absurd, and frankly tragic, figure who successfully managed to self-insert themselves into Gamergate as a form of self-promotion. They are now (at the time of writing) trying to parley their self-inflicted victim status into a political career[173]. Wu would probably have passed beneath Gamergate's notice if she hadn't tried to draw their attention, but she deliberately drew a big target on her behind and hung it over the parapet while screaming 'Shoot me!' With so many people involved in Gamergate, someone was bound to take the bait, 'gater or troll.

Wu's first attempt to get Gamergate's attention was to create a secondary Twitter account 'Brololz'[174] claiming it as some protest against 4Chan's 'sockpuppet' supporters of Gamergate. It was desperately unfunny and barely noticed, as well as being based on a mostly false premise about the opposition.

Wu then tried again to garner Gamergate's attention by posting a series of mocking memes, using an image – unfortunately – taken from an autism charity. This, again, went about as well as expected[175] ending only in more mocking of Wu and far funnier subversions of her attempts to create a 'forced meme'.

Following this, she was doxxed on 8Chan's Gamergate board. This was condemned by Gamergate members, many of whom stayed up late into the night spamming the dox off the board so they couldn't be seen or used. She was also hit on Twitter with spammed abuse and spurious threats which – apparently – prompted her to call the police. These were also mass reported and countered by members of Gamergate, but this was again conveniently ignored. Whoever this abuser was, they were not – seemingly – connected with Gamergate in any meaningful way.

Wu finally managed to get attention both from the media and from Gamergate through a series of unhinged interviews on Huffington Post, David Pakman and others. There she repeatedly blamed anyone and everyone Gamergate-related for the threats on her life, which nobody but her took seriously. Apparently for a good reason since the FBI and other law enforcement agencies found nothing credible about them. Something Wu, again, took issue with, making law enforcement rather than Gamergate the subject of her ire for a time and leading to bewildered emails by law enforcement officials being made public.

Since then, to anyone in the know, Wu has been something of a 'lolcow'. She can be relied upon to say inane and silly things for attention (such as claiming the Nintendo character Samus is transgender) and to take nonsense far too seriously. Wu has also been somewhat discredited by former employees[177] and has even clashed with others who have also attempted to exploit Gamergate to raise their profiles[178].

Claiming victim status doesn't appear to have helped Wu's career, her terrible game – Revolution 60 – bombed, even without Gamergate's help to do so. Mass ranks of feminist support for the 'embattled developer' never manifested themselves, probably down to Wu's obnoxious and exploitative personality. Wu does, however, seemed to have managed to wangle themselves something of a career as a professional victim, telling sob stories about herself. That seems to be the basis upon which she is making this run on her State Congress. It's an Internet safety/harassment ticket, but rooted in inaccurate data about those issues and threatening privacy and freedom. Wu's ideas surrounding these issues appear to be dangerous and resource consuming, demanding that law enforcement take non-credible online threats seriously, treat spurious online threats the same way as in person threats and jailing people for heat-of-the-moment comments. The threats to Wu may have been meaningless and harmless, but the threat Wu poses to a free internet – in the unlikely event of her being elected – is very real.

It's a struggle not to be horrible to Wu. Their transgender status makes it very easy for them to cry 'bigot' when you object to anything they do. Their appearance is wild, unkempt and more than a little crazy. Unfortunately, the person is so tied up and entangled in their crazy ideas that to criticise the one is taken to be abuse to the other. They're also married to Frank Wu, an artist caught up and involved in the whole set of 'Sad Puppies' issues around the Hugo Awards. I gave up trying to communicate meaningfully with Wu quite early on, just as well since they quickly began using the block bot.

Randi Harper

Randi Harper is a sort of 'third tier' exploiter of the Gamergate controversy, below even Brianna Wu, but she is notable for a number of reasons. Those are primarily her creation of the 'Good Game Autoblocker' (part of the disturbing tendency of people to deliberately place themselves in online echo chambers) and her founding of the 'Online Abuse Prevention Initiative'. This is a group that has apparently done nothing, but is allied with the equally dubious, do-nothing money-sink the 'Crash Override Network'.

For an anti-harassment campaigner, Harper has engaged in a tremendous amount of online abuse and harassment, running multiple people off Twitter with ill-treatment and nastiness from herself and her follower base[179]. She was even, essentially, forced out of the FreeBSD community, to which she had been contributing for some time, for self-aggrandising claims and nasty behaviour[180].

Despite all this hypocrisy Harper seems to have tagged along to various events and talks, been to Google, been involved in CON's doxxing and other bad actions and still seems rather untouched by her terrible behaviour. The contention that she is an exploiter of controversy seems supported – even more so – by the fact that in 2010 she was reporting that she had never experienced harassment. Further, she said that women claiming so were seeking attention and publicity. Perhaps this was a self-fulfilling prophecy[181].

Harper's listing of people as 'harassers' and the accessible nature of the blocker database led me to send legal letters to both her and 'Oolon' of the Atheism Plus block bot regarding libel which, thankfully, resulted in some changes. I should rather see such politically based block lists removed altogether as I think they create echo chambers, but there's only so much you can do. I also – briefly – fell for one of Harper's 'clogbots' that posted nonsense to the Gamergate hashtag, something that many commentators have made a great deal of. What kind of person does that kind of thing though, and does it breach Twitter's terms of service?

Katherine Clark & Other Politicians

Katherine Clark is a Democrat representative in Massachusetts and one of a number of overtly 'Social Justice Warrior', post-third-wave, authoritarian feminists found in modern politics. In the UK her equivalent would, perhaps, be the MP Jess Phillips who has made similar calls for increased censorship and control of the Internet under the banner of 'safety'.

As with many politicians, Clark is hilariously (but dangerously) clueless when it comes to technology and online culture, especially about the issues surrounding anonymity. This is a little less surprising when you see that Clark had been 'listening and believing' to Brianna Wu[182].

Clark has made something of a mini-career out of intervening in various online controversies, such as the (quickly forgotten) fuss around the 'game' Stolen[183] and a pulled panel at SXSW[184]. She is an example of a trend of authoritarians and censors within governments of latching onto the 'online safety' narrative as a way to try and introduce extended regulation and control of the Internet[185].

At best the attempts of people like Clark and Phillips are clueless[186], at worst they're a cynical exploitation of other people's ignorance and desire to protect women, to push an agenda of control. We have seen the model at work already with the increasing censorship of Internet pornography in the UK, via disingenuous manufacture of a link between pornography and trafficking[187]. The result has little or nothing to do with what they claim to be fighting, and everything to do with censorship, control and the enforcement of a (small 'c') conservative moral viewpoints.

The irony of all of this is that the people being exploited to push these political agendas are often the kinds of people who get caught up in the resulting censorship. As people of unconventional sexuality or who have been involved in pornography – as many of Gamergate's opponents have been – they're likely to end up harmed by the very restrictions and political agendas they are enabling. This has been especially notable as tightened restrictions have hit the LGBT community, making their content less searchable, less monetizable and less visible.

Women in Tech

There's a long-standing issue with women in STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)[188]. The blame for this is placed on various causes. Whether it constitutes a problem or not is also a subject of debate – especially thanks to the Gender Equality Paradox. This paradox can be summed up in this way, people in the most egalitarian countries tend to make the most gendered career choices.

Lots of money and effort has been spent trying to push women towards STEM careers, intervening in the school system and getting women who do work in tech to act as role models to younger women. This does not, however, appear to have had any significant effect, in fact, the number of women in STEM roles is declining (at least in the USA) and fewer men, too, are going for these careers.

In one camp there are essentialists – to one degree or another - who argue that this is down to hard-wired gender differences in behaviour and desire. That men are simply more inherently interested in mechanics and linear problem solving, while women are more interested in relationship-oriented issues. In the other camp are constructivists, of varying levels, who argue that these roles and proclivities are entirely socially constructed.

The second camp blames society as a whole and the 'male' nature of the work culture in STEM for the lack of women in technology roles. It frequently blames sexism and misogyny – loosely defined – for the fact that fewer women go into STEM, stay within STEM careers, or use the STEM degrees that they earn. This is the main narrative that dominates the media about this issue, that it is a climate of sexism and 'brogrammer' culture that excludes women[189].

Gamergate was a godsend to people pushing this narrative; it appeared – due to pre-existing bias – to confirm that the worlds of games and technology were misogynistic. It fed into this existing story, which was already well established in the media and this is part of the reason that the 'harassment' spin took hold so effectively. It didn't matter that this wasn't what it was about, here were what appeared to be misogynistic attacks on women and minorities in a STEM field (games) that confirmed what had been asserted for some time.

Gamergate, in the meantime, as exemplified by its support for TFYC, the existence of NotYourShield and the participation of female developers[190] was having none of it. Those female developers, gamers and others involved in Gamergate took a different view to the dominant narrative as well. They have found the attitudes prevalent in the media and from activists to be patronising and to have created an inaccurate culture of victimhood that was responsible for putting women off STEM careers.

Attempted solutions to these issues don't seem to have produced any fruit, and there remains a general shortage of STEM graduates compared to demand. There is a need for graduates of both sexes. Sadly, fixating on women doesn't seem to be working. Further, the demand for companies to employ women in STEM fields is leading to positive discrimination, which breeds resentment. There simply aren't enough women with the right qualifications for every company to fulfil a quota, or to employ the best people for the job.

I don't know what the solution is to these issues, but women – and men – should be free to pursue whatever career they want to, STEM or not. Diversity hires, quotas and positive discrimination only seem to breed resentment and hobble companies who aren't acting out of bias but simply reflecting the proportions of the available hiring pool. The victim narrative and portraying the tech industry as misogynistic and hateful certainly can't be helping. Exploiting and misrepresenting Gamergate to push that point is opportunistic, and an example of the very unethical journalism Gamergate formed to fight.

For my part, I've experienced sexism and suspicion in the other direction. Originally I wanted to be a teacher's assistant, with a view to possibly becoming a primary school teacher later on if I liked the work. The sheer amount of suspicion directed at me – and so I was later to find out, other male applicants – ended up putting me off. The assumption seemed to be that the only reason any man might want to work with young kids must be because he was a paedophile. Having worked in a school for my work experience placement, I already knew that the young boys in these schools were crying out for male and role models. I just couldn't follow through with the implicit suspicion and judgement hanging over it.

Sarkeesian

Sarkeesian was not initially, really, related to Gamergate despite being responsible for much of the atmosphere that made Gamergate – or something like it – inevitable. Still, Sarkeesian and her – at the time - boyfriend and collaborator Jonathan McIntosh were quick to exploit the situation as it unfolded. As a pre-existing feminist voice and 'victim' on the radar of the media, Sarkeesian was a go-to person to talk to. Time and again she appeared in news and gaming outlets, name-dropping Gamergate as a source of abuse and reinforcing the harassment narrative. Companies and groups seeking to distance themselves from accusations of even tacitly supporting harassment sought to virtue signal by consulting with or donating to her organisation, Feminist Frequency. This also happened – to a lesser extent – with others exploiting the situation, such as Quinn and Harper.

Sarkeesian did very well out of this, perhaps most especially from Intel throwing money into the 'women in tech' and 'online harassment' causes, including Feminist Frequency[191]. Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency had a lot to gain by perpetuating the abuse narrative, financially and otherwise. Self-inserting into the controversy was a good way to do this (symbiotic trolling).

There's no doubt that Sarkeesian was trolled, a lot. However, there are no known links to Gamergate in any of it. Sarkeesian was baited – and disagreed with – long before the advent of Gamergate. Little wonder with her public, fairly extreme feminism and repeated attacks on people's beloved hobby, both advertising a weakness for trolls to exploit and genuinely upsetting game fans. At one point Sarkeesian published a 'week of harassment', hundreds and hundreds of Tweets, etc. which were, at one point, claimed to be due to Gamergate[192].

I combed through the first hundred abusive messages and found zero with any link to Gamergate. Many of them were from 'burner' accounts or low-post new accounts with various warning signs of being a troll account. Amongst what was claimed to be abusive was also a relatively high proportion of things that were simply a disagreement or expressed anger. The claims of abuse are, and there is no doubt of this, being vastly overstated for activist and political ends. It's hard to believe such misrepresentation of facts isn't deliberate. That's abuse of a kind and has negatively impacted hundreds, thousands, of people.

In fact, when it came to severe abuse Sarkeesian and others benefitted from the intervention of Gamergate which was, however futilely, trying to counter the false narrative that it was a harassment group. Perhaps the best example of this, besides the Harassment Patrol, was when Sarkeesian came under-focussed abuse from a mysterious series of accounts consistently linking to a set of webpages and articles about Sarkeesian. It was Gamergate, not Twitter, that successfully investigated this and found the culprit. This was 'Celebrinando', a Brazilian click baiters and troll named Mateus[193]. Gamergate located, him, Gamergate exposed him, Gamergate reported him and kept getting his accounts shut down – but this was never acknowledged.

He had nothing to do with Gamergate.

Sarkeesian also gained a great deal of coverage, during Gamergate, for cancelling a talk at Utah State University under a cloud of threats of violence[194]. No law enforcement agency considered the threats credible; the FBI investigations would come to the same conclusion. The University did not find them credible either. The letter, making the threat, referenced the Montreal Massacre, not well known or referenced outside of Canada, save in feminist circles and text analysis of the threat suggested the writer was a woman. There was no link, again, to Gamergate but this didn't stop a spate of interviews and news articles implicating or attacking the movement and lingering, virtually erotic shots of Sarkeesian's police guards.

Time and again this was the story. The truth and complexity of what was going on was ignored. Gamergate's role in counter-harassment and its actual concerns were ignored. The story – ironically – of a damsel in distress, was far more appealing and worth more to media outlets than the truth. This benefited people like Sarkeesian certainly and to an extent, you can't blame them for acting in their self-interest. The news media, however, is supposed to report 'the' news, not 'a' news, and the repeated attacks on and misrepresentations of Gamergate only proved their point about media ethics and perpetuated the anger. This continues, even to this day.

Again, just while writing, there have been more developments around Sarkeesian. She had a panel at Vidcon where, from the stage, she abused one of her biggest critics. After another panel, she bullied and abused a Youtuber named Boogie2988 for what he's said during the discussion. It was also revealed that at a previous conference she'd admitted it was never about the games, that she didn't consider her critics to be abusers and it was always about cultural engineering. Despite her actions she was not disciplined for her harassment. Another example of an absurd double standard and the fear with which she is viewed[211].

The Sarkeesian Effect

Feminist activists and dishonest click baiters were not the only people to exploit the Gamergate situation. Gamergate's desperation to be heard and listened to made it vulnerable to exploitation by outlets like Breitbart. Its need for solidarity and unconventional voices also made it vulnerable to scammers and catfish like Alison Prime. That sense of solidarity and need for alternative outlets also drove it to donate to many people and causes without – necessarily – being sufficiently wary of who and what they were.

A particularly upsetting example of this was the film project, The Sarkeesian Effect[195].

The Sarkeesian Effect was a project put together by Jordan Owen – men's rights commentator and activist against censorship of pornography – and Davis Aurini, a right-wing commentator who flirts with white nationalism and race realism, though this was less overt at the time. The project was initially Owen's, but Owen does not have a particularly strong or robust personality, while Aurini is much more assertive and controlling. Aurini joined the project on the basis of his supposed film-making experience and to broaden the base of support the two could get.

The two managed to garner a great deal of aid through Patreon for their film project and set about travelling to record the footage they needed. There were, almost immediately, problems and clashes between the two, who had rather different visions for the film. Owen appears to have wanted to create something of a more direct exploration and refutation of Sarkeesian's claims and an exploration around gaming culture and its criticism. Aurini seems to have wanted to create something more of a conspiracy theory documentary, something he did finally do with his cut of the film 'Immersed in Subversion'[196].

In the end, in my opinion, Aurini exploited both Owen – who strikes me as a genuine and heartfelt man with a long history of standing up against censorship and Gamergate, for money and notoriety. This was, unfortunately, at the clear and obvious cost of an effective film or counter-narrative. While The Sarkeesian Effect isn't an entirely worthless effort, it is by no means as polished or effective as it should be and was compromised in its mission by Aurini's presence. This can easily be seen by comparing the two films, Owens being far more effective, focused and polished while Aurini's is much more amateurish and less powerful.

The Sarkeesian Effect project ended up being a disaster and a source of much mirth-making by Gamergate's enemies and the ideological critics it sought to criticise. Worse, perhaps, it soured a large chunk of Gamergate on crowdfunding and donating to worthwhile projects. This book, for example, was crowdfunded and came in for a great deal of criticism and suspicion for doing so. Realistically, not every project is going to succeed, but with so much at stake and so much attention, the cost of failure is absurdly high. Independent media and games rely on this new, freeing, source of income and the more people that become soured on it, the less opportunity there is outside of regular convention.

Chapter Seven: Gamergate in Summation

Gamergate occasionally flares back into life when something particularly egregious happens, it is misrepresented (again) in the media or one of its enemies gets a significant amount of media attention on the back of the false victim narrative. As time goes on the reputation of Gamergate, wrongly, gets calcified into that of an 'online hate mob' and history gets revised, the truth about things vanishes into an Orwellian 'memory hole'. This is why I wrote this book, to offer the truth as I saw it, as I experienced it, my 'lived experience' as the Social Justice Warriors say.

This book was intended to be a retrospective. I 'retired' from Gamergate in 2016 as it ceased to be as relevant and as the trolls and the insane fringe took it over. While I was writing this one of those 'flare-ups' happened around a game called 'Last Night'. Our old friend Zoe Quinn – apparently seeking publicity for her book, to which this is a counter – condemned the game creator on social media for his 2014 support of Gamergate in a handful of Tweets. This blacklisting, the forced apologies and a sudden spate of anti-Gamergate articles had me making videos and debating all over again, as it did many other Gamergate veterans.

Even so, Gamergate is – to all intents and purposes – over. So it's worth looking back to see what it accomplished. What victories and failures did it have? What is its legacy? What can it teach us about protest, free expression and the media in an ever-more online world?

Who Won & Who Lost?

It is hard to disentangle exactly who won and lost. Gamergate's main concerns were media ethics and censorship, and while it may have won significant victories on the ethical issue, the censorship issue is ongoing, and not going as well.

When it comes to ethics, policies have been changed, implemented or just enforced. This is a considerable victory on the part of Gamergate since it was the main thrust of their campaign. Merely having the policies isn't sufficient of course, but many of those involved in Gamergate are now the self-appointed watchdogs of the Games Media, and bad-faith actions tend – now – to be found out and publicised. While this should be the job of editors, that it happens now – at all – is an improvement. All of this is a world away from the state of things as they have existed since almost the dawn of gaming. Of course, savvy games media would have used the Gamergate outrage to disentangle themselves from companies and reassert their objectivity in the first place, but that never happened.

Gamergate managed to subvert and use the tactics of their enemies – boycotts and advertiser pressure in particular – to great effect. This stole the tactic and made it clear that both sides could use it. Being more numerous than their opposition it was also more effective than when their enemies used it. Even though there have been climb-downs since and the restoration of advertising, it was a useful way to pressure companies in counter to the usual way it is abused by vocal minorities. Personally, I don't particularly approve of this tactic (boycotts, blacklisting and advertiser pressure) save where there is clear and definitive wrongdoing, but there's no denying its efficacy.

Gamergate gave an enormous amount of money to charity and, unlike their opposition, genuinely aided women in gaming and technology, victims of bullying and much more. They rescued TFYC's effort to help women break into game design, supported suicide prevention and so much more – even sponsoring a sea lion. They were indefatigable in their defiance of the unfair image being promulgated about them and did a huge amount of good, even if it was 'just' as a middle finger to their opposition.

Gamergate aided anti-censorship efforts, particularly with respect to the games Hatred and Huniepop. This set precedents on the Steam platform against censorship that had been creeping onto that platform and helped to secure a route for adult content to be distributed (then patched) on that platform.

Gamergate also helped inspire similar push-backs against cultural conservatism and 'Social Justice Warrior' interference in comics, Heavy Metal and others. There has, it seems, been something of a cultural shift against this (small 'c') conservatism and at least some of that can be attributed to Gamergate – and it should be proud of defending liberal and libertarian values that way.

Gamergate also helped underline problems in media, in a way that has since spread to mainstream culture. There are still no solutions to this, and the problem has, if anything, worsened. There is, however, now a greater awareness of the issue and the slow emergence of a new centre, based on genuine liberalism, which is a hopeful development.

Gamergate helped show ways to overcome the problems around protest movements like Occupy. It successfully, for the most part, accomplished being a leaderless movement without being divided against itself. It demonstrated how online protest could be effective, even when the media – through maliciousness or incompetence – is dead-set against you. Some of these lessons seem to have been learned or copied by other movements and protests – Black Lives Matter has mostly made it work, so it seems. It may have presented a new, successful (for now) paradigm of protest. It also showed the value and power in alternative outlets, social media and the power of humour and memes, which other groups, ones I don't, perhaps, agree with so much, have taken up and used successfully.

Gamergate's biggest scalp was certainly helping to bring down Gawker. The kings of click bait and online tabloidism. Sadly, many of its sites live on, having been sold off, but they seem to be a bit less terrible than they once were. Yes, the Hulk Hogan lawsuit and Peter Thiel had more to do with it, but Gamergate cost them seven figures and didn't let them get away with anything unchallenged. That is still significant.

Gamergate helped demonstrate that there is a market for fair, ethical, enthusiast reporting and gave a substantial boost to Youtubers as well as new, alternative gaming news outlets. It helped create a market for an honest, knowledgeable, enthusiast press without an agenda. How that will shake out over time and whether it can be a commercial success, remains to be seen.

Anti-Gamergate were not without their victories. For all their setbacks the story that dominates about Gamergate is that it was a hate group, a harassment campaign targeting women and minorities in gaming. The truth, at least so far as the mainstream record and media are concerned, is utterly eclipsed by this narrative and is the one that will go into history, virtually unchallenged.

Anti-Gamergate has earned lots of money for their causes by virtue of panicking companies and being, essentially, bribed so that those companies can virtue signal. That money might be unlikely to genuinely help anyone, but there's no denying it has been a good earner for groups like Feminist Frequency.

Anti-Gamergate has managed to push into academia as well as the media and managed to exploit Gamergate to help do this. They have also managed to get many panels on the 'issues' they raise at conventions virtually unchallenged on those panels. They've blocked any opposition or dissent by characterising any challenge that does occur as misogyny, racism, harassment and so forth. They've also successfully managed to ban or remove counter-panels or Gamergate explanatory panels from many shows – all on the back of the harassment narrative.

While it has occasionally backfired, characterising Gamergate as a hate group, conflating it with trolls, and calling what it does harassment has helped support a censorship agenda even at the governmental level. While the social conservative position of Social Justice Warriors has been pushed back, law and government lag behind, and changes are still filtering through. Governments have long had censorship and control agendas about the Internet, and the harassment narrative has provided them and the activists with a mutually beneficial excuse to pursue it.

Anti-Gamergate's characterisation of Gamergaters as haters, misogynists and harassers has cost multiple people their careers and made many companies fearful – even though those that have stood with Gamergate have reaped some benefits. There is now a de-facto blacklist against Gamergate's sympathisers, and sometimes absurd lengths have been gone to to try and defuse even potential upset from Social Justice Warriors. Even to the point of black, female Nazis appearing in WWII games[197].

Censorship efforts may have gotten pushback, but they're ongoing. Japanese games, in particular, are being targeted, with localisation increasingly being a cover for removing or editing down elements in games – sexiness especially. This has become the site of a new battle, but it seems that Social Justice Warriors have inserted themselves into localisation teams in a manner not dissimilar to how they ended up taking over the games media. Some Japanese companies remain defiant, but others – most notably Nintendo – are bowing to the unrepresentative pressure to compromise their vision.

Gamergate might be over, but it was only one battle in an ongoing culture war, and that remains to be resolved.

Charity & Fund-Raising

Part of Gamergate's legacy was its charity work. Depending on your point of view this could have been cynical exploitation, deflection, public relations, 'for the lulz', 'weaponised giving' or a sincere and genuine act of protest and defiance to confound stereotypes.

Amongst other charities, Gamergate donated money to:

- 32 different charities via JustGive

- Action Against Hunger USA

- American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

- Child's Play (notable in that before Gamergate, protests against Bioware also donated to Child's Play, or tried to)

- Extra Life

- Many individual fundraisers for medical care or family hardship.

- PACER Centre National Bullying Prevention

- The Fine Young Capitalists (aiding women into game development).

- United States Fund for UNICEF

- WWF – adopting a sea lion (as a response to the 'sealioning' cartoon)

Whatever you think the reason for this charitable giving was, Gamergate did a lot of good and a lot more good, for a lot less money, than groups like Feminist Frequency. Gamergate's charitable giving was driven by trying to confound the image of Gamers – much like Child's Play was. It reacted to 'Bring Back Bullying' not only by condemning the person who posted it but by taking real, tangible action against bullying. It responded to people such as myself being driven to the edge of suicide by taking real, concrete action for suicide prevention. It reacted to the doxxing, DDOSing and attempted sabotage of TFYC by funding and promoting them – a group that, if they were against women in gaming, they should have been against.

Giving to charity was a means of raising Gamergate's profile, chasing media coverage (though it never emerged), confounding people's image of gamers and Gamergate, and showing up the opposition by taking real, practical action that they did not. The opposition tried to dismiss Gamergate's charitable giving as 'weaponised charity' and even tried to tell charities not to take the money, or to confound those charitable efforts by campaigns against the money raising platforms themselves. A weird way to go about things when you're the 'good guys'.

Besides charities, Gamergate helped raise money for a lot of people, crowd funders and alternative news sites. The giving was also a way of showing support to sites that would do things as Gamergate wanted (ethically and enthusiastically) and games studies and indies that weren't pretension factories. Just like the charities, this was a way of doing something practical and showing up the opposition for being pseuds.

Charitable giving seems to have fallen away a little as Gamergate has faded and it's not something that has – yet – caught on with other movements. What does remain is a version of the Streisand effect, where attempts to censor and control games results in mass pre-ordering or purchase, just to extend the middle finger to the cultural 'critics'.

Reform

There has been reform, and there has been a shift in games reporting. That is expanding outward into mainstream media as similar problems are found and discussed there. There has been a loss of traffic from the dishonest sites and an increase in the traffic for independent and new sites. The shift to Youtube reviews, Let's Plays and video news seems to have accelerated, and advertising revenue and traffic for previously unethical sites seems to have gone down. Many of those sites also seem to have quietly let go of abusive columnists (or they have 'resigned'). The Escapist, in particular, seemed to go through a crisis of conscience and extensive reform, not exactly sympathetic to Gamergate per se, but taking their concerns to heart.

FCC rules changes are perhaps the most far-reaching and important shift stemming from Gamergate agitation, affecting native advertising – something that negatively affects all Internet users. The rest of the reform is fragile, relying – as it does – on the goodwill and persistence of the sites themselves to enforce their own rules, but it's a start and gamers themselves are enforcing it.

Cultural Shift

While people erroneously blame Gamergate – weirdly – for all sorts of things (leading Gamergate to invent the 'Gamergate Time Machine' to explain how they did things before they existed), they simultaneously claim Gamergate to be an irrelevant slap-fight. It can't be both.

Some of the strange things that Gamergate gets blamed for include the ascent of Trump and the rise of the 'Alt-Right'. This is a reach worthy of Mr Fantastic, given Gamergate's, broadly speaking, left wing and small 'l' libertarian ideals. It has, however, I think contributed to a cultural shift and backlash of which all of these things are an aspect. Other areas of this cultural shift have, however, also included the emergence of a new centre, a backlash against hostility to the sceptical community and a backswing against Social Justice Warriors and excessive political correctness.

To some, this can appear to be a shift to the right, and some of it is that, but for many, it is a reassertion of liberal and libertarian values. The 'left' appears to have gone insane, violating principles that liberals hold dear – such as free expression – and creating fellow-travellers between the sane left and the right, where they at least agree on things like free expression. Left and reasonable right can agree on that in the – misattributed – Voltairian sense, and this is only reinforced when liberals and leftists are spuriously accused of being Nazis simply for defending the rights of others.

This seems to be part of the problem surrounding intersectionality. Because Social Justice Warriors demand orthodoxy and adherence to a broad soup of issues, they seem to think that this must be true of those who oppose them. Brad Glasgow's research on Gamergate suggests otherwise. While Gamergate might have agreed with Milo Yiannopoulos on free speech issues, it doesn't seem to have resulted in masses of Gamergate people reading Breitbart (while Milo was working there) or much of a shift in their political views.

I think what we're seeing instead is people of a broad set of views and political positions uniting against the censorship and puritanical demands, the campus stupidity and authoritarian repression coming from the Regressive Left. To them, their enemies might seem to be a singular body, but it isn't true. They have successfully united liberals, leftists, conservatives, the politically apathetic, fans, artists, writers and others against them – at least in part. We saw a similar correction after the 90s previous excess of PC culture, and we seem to be entering a similar period of counter-attack now.

Personally the shift to the right worries me, but it's a symptom of the excesses of those who claim to be on the left. With talks being shut down, rioting over speeches, absurd philosophy and pseudoscience, moderate intellectuals such as Sam Harris being attacked... with all this, it's little wonder that people are sidling away. Whatever their political alignment. Gamergate is certainly a part of that shift, but hardly to blame for it as a whole.

Gamedropping

'Gamedropping' is the name Gamergate gave to the phenomenon of naming Gamergate in an entirely unrelated article about a completely unrelated issue. To start with this was probably an act of click baiting and demonisation. Dropping Gamergate's name into something would be almost certain to garner its attention and those of its enemies and to turn such an article into another battleground. Battling camps meant lots of clicks and lots of comments, and that meant good exposure for articles.

Over time, however, the people Gamedropping into their articles seem to have bought into their own narrative of Gamergate being a misogynistic hate movement. They continue to mention it in the context of the Alt-Right, and it has become almost standard practice to mention it in the same breath of Richard Spencer or Trump. It is also consistently mentioned whenever someone – especially a woman – is trolled online.

The perverse truth of this legacy is that, more than anything, it keeps the husk of Gamergate stumbling on. Every lie, every misrepresentation, every accusation directed at Gamergate perpetuates the outrage and annoyance. It also continually demonstrates – to those in the know – the very problems with the media that Gamergate has repeatedly talked about. Outlets that researched Gamergate before talking about it would find the very different story that is presented in this book. They would discover the FBI and WAM reports and would realise that the narrative is incorrect. That nobody does this basic research before perpetuating the 'hate group' story is telling of either the laziness or bias of the media, perhaps both.

Rewriting History

After Gamergate, we appear to be watching Orwell's concept of the 'memory hole' playing out in real time[198]. This is a legacy of Gamergate and a testament to the power of their opposition, which should be concerning to everyone. Unlike '1984' however, this is happening through an organic consensus of activists and media groups. There's no need for a conspiracy per se, just wilful ignorance of the facts, promulgation of propaganda and those who've 'done bad' acting in their self-interest and having disproportionate influence.

It has shown a vulnerability in the Internet, which was always assumed to be relatively immune to this sort of effect as it has so many different channels and methods of communication. It was previously assumed that false information would be drowned out or competed with by other sources, but that simply hasn't been how things have worked out.

The sheer volume of information available online appears to have driven people to use a relatively small handful of sites and search engines. Google's algorithm is opaque but is distorted in favour of particular sources and popular and large outlets. Initially, it was at least somewhat ranked by the amount of traffic and links – something that, again, favours and continues to favour larger sites.

The real information about Gamergate is out there, but it's scattered across social media posts that are vanishing into the past, archives that may not be run forever, independent Wikis, blog posts, Youtube channels and other ephemera. The biased, activist and media information, however, has greater financial backing, visibility and longevity. It also has greater credibility – even if it's not credible in this case. Unfortunately for Gamergate, many of its members had to be anonymous for the sake of their jobs and families. The few outlets that reported accurately on Gamergate don't have a good record for accuracy in other cases either. Sites like Breitbart – for example – are not considered credible sources or citations, yet that was virtually the only news site, to tell the truth about Gamergate. The problems compound themselves and make each other worse. Political bias only worsens this effect.

Whether you agree with Gamergate or not, whether you believe what I have presented in this book or not, this should be cause for concern. If a dominant narrative can attain such absolute hegemony across the Internet and if people – through lack of time or effort – simply believe what they're told, we should worry. It doesn't matter what political ideology or social outlook ends up controlling the narrative, the lack of oppositional points of view stifles debate and the capacity for and practice of critical thought. This isn't even something that needs to be enforced by the government, it has happened all by itself, but it could be manipulated, controlled and abused.

Legacy

Gamergate might be 'over' (the ride never ends), but it has had many legacy effects, good and bad. The 'spirit' of Gamergate, the real Gamergate, lives on. The battles it started continue and broaden in what is being called a 'culture war'. For many Gamergate was the first point that people stood up and said 'no more'. Many groups and social movements, good or bad – depending on your point of view – took Gamergate as a cue to fight back. This was also true in fandoms and subcultures that had been censored and attacked by Social Justice Warriors. Just as The Zoe Post was the spark that led to Gamergate, so – perhaps – Gamergate was the spark that resulted in the emergence of a larger cultural resistance movement.

Other Battles

Gamergate certainly seems to have inspired resistance to Social Justice Warriors in other arenas, Social Justice Warriors who had – themselves – seemed to have been activated by the inroads they had otherwise made into gaming. People were sick of being hectored, judged and hated for liking media that other people deemed 'problematic', despite not having a racist or misogynistic bone in their body.

One of the most immediate successors to Gamergate has been a battle over the demonization and censorship of Japanese games, most especially via the excuse of 'localisation'. While Japanese games do need some localisation to make jokes and language make sense in the West, many people enjoy learning about and immersing themselves in Japanese culture via the medium of the games.

The Japanese tend to be a little more open – in games – to adult and 'weird' seeming content. This is something that Western Social Justice Warriors are not so keen on, and which many outlets - seeking a 'family friendly' image - are cautious of. Localisation teams do appear to be disproportionately 'infested' with Social Justice Warriors, and they use this influence to not only to make drastic changes to games but to apply pressure to Japanese companies to censor their material. The language barrier tends to prevent western protests to this from reaching the ears of Japanese companies, meaning they get a one-sided opinion.

To this end, Operation Torrential Downpour developed out of Operation Rainfall[199][200]. Rainfall was a fan campaign to encourage Japanese companies to release their games in the west and to help promote them when they did. Downpour was a protest against the localisation/censorship specifically of 'Fire Emblem Fates', but this has since grown into a more general protest against censorship via localisation in other Japanese games. Most recently the censorship has been happening at the level of the Japanese companies themselves – through disinformation and pressure – meaning that even importing games is no longer a way to guarantee you get what the creators intended.

Attempts to force Social Justice Warrior attitudes into Heavy Metal were never going to get anywhere, but people gave it a try – more than once. Since it was never going to get anywhere 'Metalgate' was unnecessary, but it happened anyway[204]. People consistently accused of Satanism and who write songs about serial killers were never going to be a pushover or easy to shame.

Then again, when you look at the tabletop role-playing community, you find a lot of parallels with the Social Justice Warrior attacks on computer gaming – even many of the same bad actors. The tabletop Indie scene is a hotbed of the same kinds of politics and judgement as the Indie scene in computer games, and I've been on the receiving end myself – often.

I say 'then again' because RPG players were attacked as vociferously as Heavy Metal fans, during The Satanic Panic, accused of all manner of evil doings. There was resistance to this at the time, but this time around, even with just as spurious accusations, the industry seems to have gone along with it. Companies have leveraged their financial power to censor competitors, activists have forced material to be banned from sale, there have been petitions and blacklists.

Even so, there has been resistance there too, the emergence of 'edgier' material in reaction, the counter-politicisation of aspects of the tabletop scene – most especially the Old School Renaissance (harking back to the early days of role-playing). Division and polarisation may not be a good thing overall, but at least there is still a choice.

Gamergate also helped to revitalise the 'Sad Puppies'[206] movement in science fiction and fantasy writing. Starting out as a protest against the politicisation of the Hugo Awards and the control of the award by a cabal of overtly left wing (and more importantly pretentious) writers. As with Gamergate the protesters were mischaracterized and misrepresented, despite arguing for – if anything – greater diversity (of ideas) and rewarding writers of all kinds. That has since progressed, perhaps in part down to Gamergate – into an attempt to create new and alternative outlets and awards, rather than to bother trying to fight back directly. This seems to have been reasonably successful, especially with the emergence of a 'pulp revival' that seems to be gaining ground. Sad Puppies is a precursor to Gamergate (emerging in 2013) but the two share enemies and games and genre literature cross over a great deal.

There has been resistance in comics, amongst TV fans, on campuses and even in academia itself [205]. Much of it seems to be informed by, or at least fellow travellers with, veterans of Gamergate or whose profiles were raised by it. The risk is, of course, that the backlash will end up as severe as what it's reacting to, but for the time-being at least, now, there is a debate.

Internet Censorship

Internet censorship has gained enormous traction in recent years and not just in repressive regimes like China. Germany has successfully applied pressure over 'hate speech' to Facebook, and other Internet choke points and the UK has an unholy alliance of radical feminism and traditional conservatism, working hard to put the pornography genie back in its bottle. Gamergate – or rather Gamergate's enemies – have only made this problem worse.

The promulgation of the harassment narrative, even reaching as high as the United Nations, has tried to turn trolling and Internet harassment into a major issue, and a women's issue. This despite the fact that the majority of victims of online abuse are men. As a result, we have seen the repeated intrusion of legal sanction into the online space and repeated calls for an end to online anonymity. There has been little discussion over the benefits that this brings many groups of people and what stands to be lost.

The harassment narrative makes a good excuse for unnecessary control and regulation of the Internet, just as the abusive use of victims of human trafficking has made a good excuse for the censorship of adult material. Whenever laws are brought in on these things, or even corporate 'firewalls' there is an inevitable overreach. Back in 2013 the conversation was all about child abuse and extremism, but the extent of the blocking caught up all manner of material in its 'opt out' claws, including such strange topics as 'esoteric material.'

While many of those acting to control the Internet are up-front and genuine about their reasons, albeit misguided and foolish, many of the allies they have garnered have ulterior motives. Even worse, many of the people up in arms about women being 'abused' online (typically newspaper columnists and politicians being disagreed with) were once staunch advocates against Internet censorship. It seems that having a m'lady' to hat-tip too makes a fundamental difference to people's supposed principles – and that too is dangerous. It can hardly be called equal, or even feminist, to shield women from criticism and dissent for expressing unpopular points of view. Equality needn't be pretty.

The Great Meme War

The Great Meme War[202] is typically used to describe the online battles over Britain's membership of the European Union and the US presidential election that resulted in Donald Trump. More accurately, in my opinion at least, it describes the online aspect of the ongoing culture war that is raging across First World, Western nations. The US presidential election is merely the end-cap on a particular battle in that war.

Gamergate made enormously effective use of memes, humour, shitposting, tag-flooding, trolling and other online behaviours during its conflict. This enabled it to 'own' social media and comment sections throughout its conflict. Gamergate's enemies might control the history and the 'high ground' of the media, but in spite of that Gamergate's persistence, numbers and mockery stood them in good stead. These factors let them win the war itself and dominate the online space.

Some of this appears to have bled into the presidential race and the Brexit vote. It's important to note, however, that much like 4Chans /pol/ board, a lot of the activity in support of both President Trump and Brexit was ironic. Much of it also wasn't necessarily in actual support of either Trump or Brexit, but rather against Clinton, against the status quo, against Europe and entirely for the sake of upsetting and 'triggering' people. Trump got people wound up, Brexit got people wound up, and being wound up makes people prime targets for trolling.

The genuine right wing and the Alt-Right had, however, learned lessons from their parasitism of Gamergate and the growing concern about 'safe spaces', extreme 'left' college activism and censorship. They learned to use memes, they learned to use the online space (which had been out of the grasp of conservatism since its inception) and – perhaps most importantly – they learned to be funny. The right wing has, traditionally, never been funny, since Alternative Comedy became a thing in the 80s. This – historically – been one of the right's great weaknesses. This change in the status quo was even admitted, by one activist, in front of the 'He Will Not Divide Us' camera[203].

The left (and the 'left') has become increasingly humourless, po-faced, strident and pompous, rendering it vulnerable to satire and mockery – however much they claim that this is 'punching down' to the oppressed. Not to mention that many of its positions are absurd, and hence humorous, on their face. Take the assertion that 'black people can't be racist', for example. A claim entirely contingent on a redefinition of the meaning of 'racism' to a narrow, particular, pseudo-academic interpretation of the term.

Driven by sincerity or not, the unstoppable mockery of Clinton and the forces of the Regressive Left have contributed to political upsets. This has been aided and abetted by the total cluelessness of the targets of that mockery when it comes to Internet culture. Clinton and the Southern Poverty Law Centre trying to claim Pepe as a hate symbol was, ironically, symbolic of just how out of touch that side of the political spectrum has been. It only increased the sheer volume and extremity of Pepes.

Thus far this effect has been limited to English speaking countries and hasn't managed to gain traction in, for example, the French elections (Macron won, despite 'Meme Warrior' support for Le Pen). The situations are different, and the excesses of the Regressive Left aren't necessarily as egregious outside of the 'Anglosphere'. The Meme War continues, but with conservatives seeing themselves as being in positions of power again and beginning to overstep their bounds, threaten expression, threaten the Internet and get 'triggered', the shoe may be creeping back to the other foot.

It's starting to feel like 'degenerate' is the new 'problematic'.

A Shift to the 'Not Left.'

It's important to emphasise, important enough to repeat that the legacy of Gamergate and similar resistance to Social Justice Warriors is not a shift to the right. It is a counter to the excesses of those who call themselves 'left' (and who, in my not so humble opinion, aren't really on the left). It's not so much that the opposition is right wing, rather that they are 'not left', or at least not the 'left' that is causing problems.

While there are conservatives involved, and they have reaped some of the rewards of this resistance, it's worth remembering that the majority of Gamergate was libertarian-left. It included people from across the political spectrum and from all manner of minorities. A rejection of the extreme 'left', as embodied in Antifa, student activists and protesters, is not necessarily a dismissal of the left as a whole. Indeed the majority of the liberals and leftists within Gamergate often cite those very left-liberal principles as their reasons for rejecting Social Justice Warrior beliefs and bigotry.

Speaking for myself, that is entirely why I reject it. As a person on the far left, of near-anarchistic beliefs, I reject Social Justice Warriors because of their Identity Politics. I believe equality, egalitarianism, comes from treating people the same way – universally. It doesn't come, it cannot come, from embracing prejudice and an endless array of cases of special pleading. It's equality of opportunity, not outcome.

I find their authoritarianism troubling and their attempt to set themselves up as moral guardians repulsive and a mirror image of the evangelical right in the 1980s. I find their collusion with attempts to stop and silence art, music, games, comics and the Internet to be nothing short of betrayal and hypocritical. Groups and social causes that benefited so much from assertions of the right to free expression now seem content to pull the ladder up behind them.

I hate how their rabid extremism has helped to de-legitimise the genuine ideas of the left, dragging them down with them. How their lunacy has empowered the right and alienated much of the centre – as well as more genuine and consistent left-liberal people in society. I hate how they don't seem to learn from their mistakes or care.

I hate how they are increasingly rejecting science, becoming their versions of climate deniers and creationists as they reject biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, even physics and mathematics in favour of an entirely 'constructivist' and postmodern view of the world.

It used to be able to be said, with a straight face, that reality had a left wing bias. I hate them for taking that away.

I'm still left-wing; they're not.

New Vs Old Media

The shift from legacy media to new media has been going on for a while, but Gamergate seems to have accelerated the process. The total failure of the legacy media to report accurately on Gamergate made a huge number of Generation X and Generation Y people – who had otherwise been somewhat disengaged from political and social issues – aware that something was wrong.

The Emperor had been naked for some time, but now it was a lot more obvious than it had been.

This isn't to say, necessarily, that the new media is necessarily any better. While new sites and outlets have sprung up, they're often no better than the legacy media outlets that they seek to replace. Infowars, for example, is terrible. It's, at best entertainment, rather than news. Even when its associated reporters and figureheads – such as Paul Joseph Watson – make a good (occasional) point, it is usually encased in hyperbole, paranoia and nonsense.

The crisis of trust, the exposure of a lack of professionalism and effort, the failure of the old media to present 'The News' rather than 'A News' has been massively deleterious to democracy. Without trusted figures in news media, the 4th Estate fails in its duty to hold power accountable. In taking one side, it alienates the opposite side. In such a circumstance truth is hard to determine and ideologues and shysters can operate with relative impunity.

The response of the legacy media to this crisis of conscience and confidence appears to have been to attack new media, rather than to clean up its act. With regard to Gamergate, the biased coverage has repeatedly been challenged in the UK, US, Canada and Australia only to be met with stonewalling by public broadcasters. Private broadcasters have met it with blank indifference or explicitly compromised ethics; “It makes a better story.” With regard to the broader crisis of confidence, they have repeatedly attacked new outlets, seem bemused by social media, have closed comment sections and have striven to undermine Youtube as a viable outlet for alternative news and current affairs coverage.

Everyone's a Nazi, apparently.

The route back is for the mainstream media to get its act together and start acting with professionalism and integrity again. Sadly, this seems massively unlikely (in part because it's simply not profitable). That leaves new media to gain these values and – outside of a few isolated examples[207] – this too seems unlikely. New media is just as fragile to financial and private censorship as the mainstream media is, and often lacks the resources to support a truly professional level of polish and standards.

This is why we're in a 'post-truth' era[208].

An Uncertain Future

The culture of games and the culture at large both seem to be very uncertain at the moment. Gamers – and others – have shown that they're willing to fight. They've shown that being tight with their communities can reap financial and social rewards, but at a cost to reputation in the more mainstream point of view. Politics is out of touch and listening to that point of view, and larger corporations - without the flexibility and personality of smaller businesses - seem less able to weather the PR storm and act for the best – rather than reflexively.

Polarisation exists at every level of our societies, this is more visible at the political level where anything left of Hitler or right of Stalin is still considered to be as bad as Hitler or Stalin from either side. We have so-called liberals out on the streets beating people half to death, pepper-spraying women, shutting down speeches and shooting at politicians. Meanwhile, so-called conservatives taking liberal positions on free expression, only to use that freedom to spread hate and division of their own.

It's an insane time, and there's not any way to navigate it without setting one side, the other, or both against you. Old school liberals and leftists are being decried as fascists, old school conservatives are being told they're 'cucked', compromised, traitors to conservative values.

Any art you make, whether it's a game, a book, a comic, a film – anything – is going to be judged not on its artistic merit, but on its adherence to political orthodoxy. It will be judged on whether anything, anywhere, at any point in it violates one interpretation or another of that ideology.

Either extreme only values free expression so far as it serves them. The 'left' only values free expression so far as it allows them to promulgate their ideas without opposition. Anyone who disagrees must be deplatformed, shut down, shut up, censored, banned from social media and excoriated in The Guardian. The 'right' only values free expression to the point it lets them spread their point of view. They've been the biggest supporters of it only because – socially – they've not been in the ascendant the last decade or so. Now that they have a taste of power again they too want to censor 'degeneracy' and even shut down plays or satire that lampoon their sacred cows.

Meanwhile, there's a swathe of people in the middle who want everyone to be free to make their arguments with each other, to make the art they want to and to let the cream rise to the top. Whether you're saying 'problematic', 'degenerate' or 'think of the children', it's all just a limp excuse to exert control. With opportunistic politicians using these battles to justify control, spying and censorship, it's unclear whether culture will emerge from the other side unscathed or not.

And yet the people who just want people to be free to create and debate, are the bad guys?

Give me a break.

Last Minute, Last Night

As I was writing this book, Gamergate flared into life again. At E3 in 2017, a presentation was made of a game called 'The Last Night'. This is a dystopian cyberpunk game that combines stylised pixel graphics with beautifully rendered backgrounds. It grabbed a lot of people's attention, as did its creator, Tim Soret.

As the game was originally conceived, it seems to be a dystopian examination of extreme progressivism, taking it to a dark and authoritarian extreme in the same way other dystopian fiction has considered other ideologies taken to extremes. This would probably be enough to get Soret and his studio into trouble, because you're simply not allowed to do that anymore, but he had also done 'worse'.

Back in 2014, Soret had tweeted the Gamergate hashtag a couple of times, making completely reasonable and uncontroversial statements:

“The Gamergate people are for journalistic integrity, honest debate, transparency, inclusiveness, egalitarianism.”

“I don't agree. I'm against feminism because it's getting more & more skewed. I am for egalitarianism. I don't care boy, girl, alien.”

“People who blame art & entertainment for society's ills are always on the wrong side of history.”

And so on. Agree or not, there's nothing terrible in these sorts of statements, nor in examining how the excesses of even 'good' ideology can lead to bad outcomes. This is part of the point of art, after all, especially speculative fiction and games.

The combination of criticism of progressivism and having supported Gamergate in the past was, however, enough to get our old friend Zoe Quinn to shriek onto the Internet. She was 'buttmad', as they say on the Internet, about how a Gamergate supporter was having their game presented and was up on stage. This had nothing whatever to do with her book's pre-orders being terrible and needing attention, of course.

This cause was taken up by the usual suspects and Soret was then subjected to a barrage of hate, abuse, blacklisting, justification for blacklisting and so forth all over the Internet and the usual sites. Despite getting a great deal of support from Gamergate the companies he and the game were associated with posted embarrassing climb-downs[209]. This was probably the worst thing he, or they, could have done since nothing would placate the Social Justice Mob and grovelling only pissed off the people willing to fight for Soret's right to free expression. Many believe they should have done a 'Protein World' instead and told the 'critics' where to go[210].

The combination of censorship, Zoe Quinn sticking her oar in and the flurry of judgemental articles in gaming's 'yellow press' brought the hibernating corpse of Gamergate back to life, causing the hashtag to trend again. The Last Night controversy was then immediately followed by two rapid-fire anti-Gamergate articles in CNET, one lionising Brianna Wu and the other blaming Gamergate for Trump.

To many people, it felt like 2014 all over again, but it looks like things are slowly calming back down. This should last until September when Quinn's book 'How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate' is due to be published. Doubtless to another flurry of masturbatory articles and misrepresentations of what Gamergate was, and is.

The irony in this latest flaring up is that it rather confirms Soret's premise. That societal control will come through social media and private enterprise rather than 'Big Brother' and that the excesses of 'progressivism' can be as dystopian as any corporatocracy. After all, it is those forces of 'progressivism' that are blacklisting those with opposing points of view, like Soret, and using private companies and social media pressure to enforce their will.

'It's OK when we do it' seems to be the case.

Parting Comments

Hopefully, throughout this book, I've managed to make the case to you that there was more to Gamergate than what was being presented. That it was a genuinely important battle in the ongoing culture war, even if it wasn't responsible for Donald Trump or the Alt-Right. Hopefully, I've convinced you, through this, that Gamergate had a point about the problems with the media and the assault on the freedom artists need to create compelling material.

These problems exist on a wider scale now and, if nothing else, Gamergate has helped engage a large number of otherwise politically apathetic people in the process of social and political change. I hope some of you will draw the courage to stand up for what you believe in, what you value, and will come to understand that you can't just wait it out. More motivated and zealous people are coming for the things you love, and if you don't get motivated, they will take them from you.

When I created the Gamergate the Card Game I, intent on making a joke, called Gamergate 'the defining culture war of this generation'. I wasn't serious at the time, but now, years later, three years from when it all started, I think I may have been right. Many a true word is spoken in jest, as they say.

For me, as a teenager, metalhead, goth and tabletop gamer in the 80s and 90s, the defining culture war for me was The Satanic Panic and the lesser 'Vampire Panic'. That defined the subcultures I was a part of for that generation in a way Gamergate has for this generation. The scars run deep, the lessons run deeper, which is why it has surprised me so much to see so many people – who should know better – being anti-Gamergate. It seems when you accuse something of being 'problematic' rather than 'Satanic' people lose the ability to detect that they're being played.

Gamers make unlikely and uncomfortable heroes. They're rude, crude, politically incorrect, steeped in memes, in-jokes and Internet culture, but they also spend a large part of their lives – virtually – righting wrongs and playing the hero. Gamers' indefatigable defence of their hobby, even when their press and many of the makers of their games betrayed them, is something hugely inspiring. Perhaps we shouldn't find it unlikely that people who will grind their way for years through World of Warcraft and who will best Dark Souls will put that same determination against other enemies.

They only ever wanted to play video games, but thank fuck they looked away from the screen.

References

Poe's Law: “Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture that states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.” (Wikipedia)

"Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism." https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/233594800908169217

Mark Ronson on Online Shaming https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_what_happens_when_online_shaming_spirals_out_of_control (TED Talk)

"A section of the left that has an inherent hesitation to challenge some of the bigotry that can occur within minority communities for the sake of political correctness. For the sake of tolerating what they believe are other cultures, and respecting different lifestyles." http://bigthink.com/videos/maajid-nawaz-on-islamic-reform

'Youtube is Facing a full-scale Advertising Boycott over Hate Speech' https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/24/15053990/google-youtube-advertising-boycott-hate-speech

Gail Dines, Growing up in a Pornified Culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YpHNImNsx8

Theresa May to Create new Internet that Would be Controlled and Regulated by Government: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/theresa-may-internet-conservatives-government-a7744176.html

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

John Gilmore, EFF. TIME magazine (6 December 1993).

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976).

Pepe the Frog at ADL: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/pepe-the-frog

Dindu Nuffin: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dindu-nuffin

Octobriana: http://pdsh.wikia.com/wiki/Octobriana

How the Comics Code Killed the Golden Age of Comics https://www.buzzfeed.com/saladinahmed/how-the-comics-code-killed-the-golden-age-of-comics?utm_term=.afywrWzxd#.rsdWm2Xgz

Introduction to Psychology, James W Kalat.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060719052541/http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20060524&Category=OPINION0106&ArtNo=605250314&SectionCat=OPINION03&Template=printart

Operation Choke Point https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/02/documents-about-financial-censorship-under-operation-choke-point-concern-congress

Impact of Digital Economy Bill on UK Porn http://www.artefactmagazine.com/2017/02/06/the-death-of-kink/

WSJ on 'monetised hate speech' https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-youtube-has-continued-showing-brands-ads-with-racist-and-other-objectionable-videos-1490380551

Youtube Blacklist: http://www.craveonline.com/design/1245231-youtube-advertiser-claims-sites-blacklisting-provocative-channels-destroying-revenue

LGBT & Restricted Mode: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/youtube-lgbt-restricted-mode/

Pewdiepie Apologises: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/02/16/an-attack-by-the-media-pewdiepie-apologizes-for-nazi-jokes-but-says-the-press-is-out-to-get-him/?utm_term=.7d6c0d13251c

'How to be a Feminist' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzcs4ti_bdI – Some will claim this is a quote mine but, importantly, while she admits that this was 'obnoxious' it was and remains her view, she simply dismisses peoples inability to see this 'truth' as being down to the comfort of living within 'systems' rather than disagreement.

Dark Erotica Vs Corporate Censorship http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mara-white/nikki-sloane-dark-erotica_b_10197502.html

Colbert & Occupy Wall Street: http://ew.com/article/2011/11/02/colbert-occupy-wall-street/

Reproducibility Issues: http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

The Conceptual Penis: http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/

The Sokal Affair: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/weinberg.html

The Playful is Political: https://gitgud.io/gamergate/gamergateop/blob/master/Archive/DiGRA_Transcript

Sarkeesian & Mandossian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaPbgNVuaEI

Sarkeesian Debunked in Under a Minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW-69xXD734

Stolen Artwork: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132778-Anita-Sarkeesian-Stole-my-Artwork-Claims-Blogger

Stolen Footage: https://vicsorsopinion.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/anitas-sources.html

Sarkeesian & Hitman https://medium.com/@adrianchm/anita-sarkeesian-and-hitman-256cd0301463

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

Devs Owe You Nothing: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-11-why-devs-owe-you-nothing

Colin Moriarty ME3 Opinion: http://uk.ign.com/videos/2012/03/12/mass-effect-3-opinion-video

Suey Park on Huffington Post Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNK-e6nnFGY

Wage Gap Debunked by Feminists: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-gap_b_2073804.html

Gender Equality Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

Pew Survey of Online Harassment http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/

Demos – Men Harassed More: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cheep-shots-men-get-most-twitter-abuse-bxlk3x50dz5

Treating Women Equally Seen as Sexist: https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/6958/Yeung_Amy.pdf?sequence=1

You're a Liar, You Suck: https://www.polygon.com/2015/9/25/9399169/united-nations-women-cyber-violence-anita-sarkeesian-zoe-quinn

Criado-Perez Trolls Arrested: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-trolls-isabella-sorley-and-john-nimmo-jailed-for-abusing-feminist-campaigner-caroline-criado-9083829.html

Gregory Allen Elliot: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/22/canada-man-twitter-harassment-not-guilty-gregory-alan-elliot

Gerstmanngate: http://kotaku.com/5893785/yes-a-games-writer-was-fired-over-review-scores

Ironically this story about Youtube corruption issues is written by one of the initial foci of corrupt games journalism highlighted by Gamergate. http://kotaku.com/the-messy-story-behind-youtubers-taking-money-for-game-1644092214

Dys4ia http://flavorwire.com/443187/the-dys4ia-debate-how-queer-creators-are-challenging-conventional-ideas-about-what-makes-a-video-game

Arthur Gies is scared of breasts: https://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u

A Walking Simulator https://fullbright.company/gonehome/

Critical Theory: https://www.thoughtco.com/critical-theory-3026623

DIGRA: http://www.digra.org/

Satanic Panic RPG: http://thirdact.pub/games/satanic-panic/

UK Draft Law Against Space Invaders: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1981/may/20/control-of-space-invaders-and-other

Video Game Income: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-reaches-99-6-billion-2016-mobile-generating-37/

The Little Grey Book: https://postmortemstudios.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/gamergate-and-depression-quest-made-me-code/

https://postmortemstudios.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/in-like-quinn/

Quinn Mugged: http://www.gamepodunk.com/topic/8380-story-of-the-day-developer-zoe-quinn-gets-mugged-indie-community-rallies-to-her-aid/

Zoe Vs Wizardchan: http://imgur.com/a/4VOcx

Quinn & Helldump: http://archive.is/Qb96g

Quinn and TFYC http://gamergate.wikia.com/wiki/The_Fine_Young_Capitalists

Polaris Game Jam: http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2016/08/chat-logs-reveal-zoe-quinn-admitting-to-sabotaging-polaris-game-jam/10429/

The Zoe Post: https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

Columbia Rape List: http://www.thedailybeast.com/someone-is-writing-lists-of-rapists-on-columbias-walls

Gjoni and the First Amendment: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/4u9li2/what_a_long_strange_trip_its_been/

Grayson Covers Zoe 1: http://archive.is/WtK25

Grayson Covers Zoe 2: http://archive.is/QwJbc

Grayson Covers Zoe 3: http://archive.is/mrVxK

Nathan Grayson Journalist Profile: http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson

Site Censorship: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/quinnspiracy

Quinnspiracy Mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz--i3M4PVk

'Gamers are Dead': http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php?title=Gamers_Are_Dead

Cultural Libertarians: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/24/rise-of-the-cultural-libertarians/

Maher and the 'N-Word' http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/03/opinions/bill-maher-n-word-not-funny-obeidallah/index.html

Icky Speech: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html

'Freeze Peach' and how SJWs justify their censorship: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2013/05/free-speech-vs-freeze-peach/

Dorito Pope: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dorito-pope

Who here hasn't slept with... http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/09/18/the-emails-that-prove-video-games-journalism-must-be-reformed/

Gamergate Political Compass http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/841842-gamergate

Jordan Peterson Testimony on Bill C16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo

Gamergate is not Right Wing: http://www.gameobjective.com/2016/11/21/no-gamergate-is-not-right-wing/

Blame Facebook: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-echo-chamber/

Like Minded People Become Extreme: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/04/20/discussing-politics-with-like-minded-people-leads-to-more-extrem/

http://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5?IR=T

AtheismPlus Block Bot: http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/08/bbc-newsnights-trolling-fail-warning-commentary/

Good Game Autoblocker http://www.newsweek.com/one-womans-new-tool-stop-gamergate-harassment-twitter-288008

Randi Harper Expose: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/06/29/harping-on-the-hypocrisy-and-lies-of-twitters-most-notorious-anti-abuse-activist-randi-harper-part-1/

Block Bot Legal Issues: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/03/20/bbc-featured-block-bot-runs-into-legal-trouble/

Wheaton's Law: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wheatons-law

The Red Pill: http://theredpillmovie.com/

Gawker's Seven figures: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gawker-gamergate-seven-figures

Rules for Radicals (Summary): https://www.steelonsteel.com/saul-alinskys-12-rules-for-radicals/

XOXOFest Vs Fighting Game Tournament: http://i.imgur.com/PnMSSQs.png

NotYourShield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqBdCmDR0M

SPJ Ethics Standards: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Guardian Leaked Email: http://theralphretort.com/internal-email-shows-guardian-mind-made-gamergate/

Leigh Alexander Profile: http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=leigh_alexander

Murray Gell-Mann Effect: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2011/08/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/

Pepe is a Hate Symbol: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/pepe-the-frog

Peter Coffin's Girlfriend: https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/03/24/internet-comedian-peter-coffins-fake-asian-girlfriend-outed-in-blogger-feud-with-xiaxue/

Black Lives Matter: http://time.com/4413786/splc-black-lives-matter/

BLM racism: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/james-di-fiore/black-lives-matter-toronto-yusra-khogali_b_14635896.html

Heterodox Academy: https://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/

Progressive Stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack

Boys at School: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/18/its-no-surprise-that-white-working-class-boys-do-badly-at-school

Working Class Racism: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/9/15592634/trump-clinton-racism-economy-prri-survey

Katherine Clark: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/katherine-clark-fight-against-internet-trolls-gamergate/

Zoe Quinn Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/zoe

Google Ideas: https://twitter.com/jigsawteam/status/646783722570682369

Twitter Trust & Safety: https://about.twitter.com/safety/council

UN Consultation: https://www.polygon.com/2015/9/25/9399169/united-nations-women-cyber-violence-anita-sarkeesian-zoe-quinn

Types of Fake News https://medium.com/1st-draft/fake-news-its-complicated-d0f773766c79

Leigh Alexander's Article https://archive.is/l1kTW

JournoList: http://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/journolist-inside-the-echo-chamber-020086

Bring Back Bullying: https://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2014/10/bring-back-bullying-says-gawker-journalist-gamergate-donates-to-anti-bully-charity/

No Credible Threat: http://www.usu.edu/today/index.cfm?id=54179

GG in DC: http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/04/gamergate-bomb-threat-militant-anti-femi

SPJ Bomb Threat: http://nichegamer.com/2015/08/17/gamergate-focused-society-of-professional-journalists-event-is-evacuated-due-to-bomb-threats/

SPJ Panels: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_m6nfi-LcFDIp-Tp5Fxrg

FTC Update https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2nz204/important_ftc_update_4_ftc_confirms_that_yes/

Hulkamania: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/business/media/gawker-bankruptcy-sale.html

Brad Wardell: https://archive.is/7e6pF

OK: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/white-power-hand-symbol-cassandra-fairbanks-mike-cernovich-alt-right-white-house-a7709446.html

Veerender Jubbal: https://news.vice.com/article/this-canadians-photo-was-doctored-to-make-him-look-like-a-paris-attacker-and-some-media-bought-it

Jace Connors: https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/24/8099531/gamergate-jace-connors-threats-comedian-hoax

Navy Seal: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta

WAM Report: https://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2015/05/gamergate-isnt-a-harassment-campaign-states-wam-report/

Newsweek Report: https://archive.fo/eWgbg

FBI Report https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14412594/fbi-gamergate-harassment-threat-investigation-records-release

Dawkins on Trolling: https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/362042051216412672?lang=en

Laurie Penny on Trolling: http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/2013/01/laurie-penny-its-time-end-culture-online-misogyny

Godfrey Elfwick & Star Wars: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/20/star-wars-racist-hoaxer-bbc-world-service-godfey-elfwick-darth-vader

Criado-Perez Trolls Jailed: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/24/two-jailed-twitter-abuse-feminist-campaigner

Sarkeesian's Spin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ

Far Cry 5 Petition: https://www.change.org/p/ubisoft-cancel-far-cry-5

Wolfenstein: http://www.avclub.com/article/internet-nazis-are-mad-about-virtual-nazi-killing-256689

Resident Evil Racism: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2009/02/10/editorial-is-resident-evil-5-racist

False Consciousness: http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/iess%20false%20consciousness%20V2.htm

Self Harassment: https://archive.is/DSJYF

Fake Racism: http://www.startribune.com/st-olaf-report-of-racist-note-on-black-student-s-windshield-was-fabricated/421912763/

Ethan Ralph: http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2016/09/ethan-ralph-from-ralphretort-com-has-been-arrested-jailed/11116/

Anti-Gamergate Sex Offenders: https://ageofshitlords.com/men-accused-gamergate-misogyny-now-jail

Fleishmann https://heatst.com/tech/tech-journo-glenn-fleishman-called-out-for-bringing-up-open-marriage-with-female-writers/

Twitch Paedophile: http://theralphretort.com/repulsive-anita-sarkeesian-has-a-convicted-pedophile-as-her-twitch-moderator-1029015/

Nafedude https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3xw6w0/gg_supporter_deadwingduck_aka_claw_suspended_for/

Sarah Butts: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/11/leading-gamergate-critic-sarah-nyberg-claimed-to-be-a-pedophile-apologised-for-white-nationalism/

Moviebob's tactics: https://lolcow.wiki/wiki/MovieBob

In Defence of Rape: https://talesofgrim.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/in-defence-of-rape/

Wikipedia Accuracy: https://www.livescience.com/32950-how-accurate-is-wikipedia.html

Activism on Wikipedia: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-feminist-edit-a-thon-seeks-to-reshape-wikipedia

Wikipedia's Principles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Principles

Anti-Harassment Policy: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Policy

Violet Blue's Talk: http://violetblue.tumblr.com/post/44107008572/what-happened-with-my-security-bsides-talk

Spot the Harassment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBfJuvopPg

Mary Sue Article https://www.themarysue.com/calgary-expo-gamergate-evicted/

Honey Badgers Vs Calgary Expo: http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/tag/calgary-expo/

Reddit Revolt: https://digiday.com/media/reddit-revolt-wtf/

Ellen Pao: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/technology/ellen-pao-kleiner-perkins-case-decision.html

How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/youtube-broadcasters-algorithm-ads.html

Holden Pulls out of Youtube: http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/holden-and-kia-pull-youtube-ads-over-misogynistic-ita-buttrose-video-20170326-gv6yvf.html

Pewdiepie: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/17/14613234/pewdiepie-nazi-satire-alt-right

David Pakman Show: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/youtube-broadcasters-algorithm-ads.html

CON Leaks: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/4zswdn/crash_override_network_leaks_megathread/

ZachAttack: https://medium.com/@mombot/zachattack-how-i-tricked-anti-harassment-advocates-into-doxing-me-4d9f055e2738

Gamergate to Trump https://www.cnet.com/news/gamergate-to-trump-how-video-game-culture-blew-everything-up/

Breitbart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News

Breitbart/Gamergate: http://www.breitbart.com/tag/gamergate/

Milo's Downfall http://heavy.com/news/2017/02/milo-yiannopoulos-pedophilia-video-child-molestation-boys-older-men-relationships-watch-cpac-graphic-uncensored-you-tube-response-priest/

Conservatism is the new Counterculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avb8cwOgVQ8

Happy Merchant: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/happy-merchant

Pepe Shout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLDX6RHTY4

Brianna Wu: https://www.cnet.com/news/after-years-of-gamergate-harassment-brianna-wus-still-fighting/

Brololz: https://archive.is/CiiVb

Memes http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/brianna-wu

Lolcow http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lolcow

Former Colleague of Wu: http://theralphretort.com/beatdown-continues-brianna-wu-gets-shredded-by-former-employee-409015/

Harper Vs Wu: http://theralphretort.com/hamburger-harper-attacks-brianna-wu-sxsw-exaggerations-3014016/

Randi Harper Abuse: https://web.archive.org/web/20150723032846/https://archive.is/UVsxZ

Harper BSD https://web.archive.org/web/20150717142551/https://archive.is/9KGyX

'Based Randi' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koYYqY-Ms38

Game of Fear: http://archive.is/LW5aV

Stolen/Famous: https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/18/11042336/famous-new-stolen-game-app

SXSW: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/28/sxsw-all-day-event-harassment-pulling-gaming-panels-gamergate

Clark's Story: http://archive.is/uGBde

Reclaim the Internet: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/why-im-campaigning-to-reclaim-the-internet-from-sexist-trolls/

UK Porn Ban: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/a-long-list-of-sex-acts-just-got-banned-in-uk-porn-9897174.html

Women in Technology: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-is-actually-getting-worse

Brogrammers: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/tech-start-up-women-brogrammers

Seedscape: https://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2015/02/seedscape-dev-dapper-swine-joins-gamergate-after-attempted-boycott/

Intel Investment: https://archive.is/Jneri

FemFreq Harassment http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-harassment-on-twitter

Celebrinando https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2jwffr/the_anita_threatener_conversations_w_a_brazillian/

Utah Threats: http://www.standard.net/Police/2014/10/14/Utah-State-University-student-threatens-act-of-terror-if-feminist.html

The Sarkeesian Effect: https://vimeo.com/185168244

Immersed in Subversion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTcYLPGoC4I&feature=youtu.be

Black Female Nazis: https://www.polygon.com/e3/2017/6/14/15798864/call-of-duty-world-war-ii-black-female-german-soldier

The Memory Hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

Operation Rainfall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rainfall

Operation Torrential Downpour: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/45w5qo/goal_operation_torrential_downpour/

Hadrian's Firewall: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2013/sleepwalking-into-censorship

The Great Meme War: https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/The_Great_Meme_War

He Will Not Divide Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Qp-iOK-PU

Metalgate: http://www.deathmetal.org/article/metalgate/

Academic Resistance: https://heterodoxacademy.org/

Sad Puppies: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/05/the-hugo-wars-how-sci-fis-most-prestigious-awards-became-a-political-battleground/

Tim Pool: https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts

Post-Truth: http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/06/29/post-truth-politics-is-driving-us-mad

Last Night Apologies: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spupkj

Protein World: http://uk.businessinsider.com/protein-world-makes-1-million-immediately-after-the-beach-body-ready-campaign-backlash-2015-4

Sarkeesian Garbage Panel http://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/06/vidcon-apologizes-to-anita-sarkeesian-says-sargon-of-akkad-was-there-to-intimidate/33958/