(Almost) Everything You Know About GamerGate is Wrong
Harassment campaign? Misogynist hate mob? Alt-right test run? It’s much more complicated.
Five years ago, a hashtag was born that blew up the internet — or, some will say, the world as we know it. It was sparked by one man’s blogpost about his messy breakup with his ex-partner, which grew into a flame war over video game criticism and then into a massive culture-war conflagration. It has been blamed for everything from the normalization of internet hate to the Donald Trump presidency. Or, as the title of the New York Times’ recent anniversary op-ed package proclaimed, “GamerGate Is Everything.” (Apparently, GamerGate is also forever: right on the heels of the anniversary, the controversy stirred back to life when the subject of the infamous blogpost, feminist video game developer Zoe Quinn, made a #MeToo accusation against another former boyfriend and he committed suicide a few days later.)
My own retrospective view, having reported on the GamerGate saga from early on, can be summed up as: “(almost) everything you’ve heard about GamerGate is wrong.”
The standard narrative, recycled in the Times and elsewhere in recent days, has made the media rounds many times before. It goes like this: A vengeful ex-boyfriend launched a harassment campaign…
