The Legacy of GamerGate
How an online mob catalyzed the alt-right
Actor Adam Baldwin (Full Metal Jacket, Firefly) tweeted the hashtag #GamerGate in August of 2014 and before too long, all hell broke loose.
Prior to Baldwin’s tweet, GamerGate was just known as the scandal that engulfed Zoe Quinn. Initially, there were serious topics being discussed: the ethics of journalism, the state of the Gaming industry with regards to its maturity around sex, politics and other real world issues, etc., but the discussions around those topics hadn’t really been bundled together under the same umbrella. So, for a bit, many of the ideas that were being thrown around were still just individual ideas that had no connecting tissue between each other. Then, Adam Baldwin tweeted #GamerGate.
In some ways, this is a story about how a hashtag can have profound, and sometimes disturbing, implicaitons. Gamergate was an ideological conflict that, more or less, featured two sides: individuals who advocated for greater diversity and inclusion in gaming and individuals who didn’t want games to change from the male-dominated medium that they were and arguably still are. Many of the pro-inclusion advocates were indie game developers and Gamer journalists, people working in the industry who were able to see what it was like and how patriarchal it could be. Many individuals on this side were notably liberals and Democrats, which has a relevance we will get to. The other side of Gamergate was made up of misogynists, anti-feminists, and people who opposed the idea of greater inclusion simply based on the fact that it was a liberal viewpoint.
Gamergate started with a single controversy in the gaming sphere: an indie game designer named Zoe Quinn released a free-to-play title called Depression Quest, which told the story of a young adult’s experiences with depression. The game was well received by the gaming press, though some players were put off by the art-house aesthetics. Others were upset by its lack of violence and the sense that it had brought “politics”, particularly progressive politics, into the gaming real. The backlash against Quinn was virulent in some corners. She was doxxed and harassed, including rape and death threats. Quinn spoke openly about the threats to the media, which caused more attention to be brought to the subject. More attention meant more threats, which meant more to discuss about gaming culture, which led to a sort of cycle early in the movement’s infancy.
A few months after Depression Quest was released, an ex-boyfriend of Quinn posted a series of extensive blog posts that claimed that Quinn had cheated on him with several men in the gaming industry as a way to further her career. (It’s been widely agreed upon that these accusations were false). Normally, this sort of thing might have settled into a minor scandal about the drama surrounding a small indie developer’s romantic life. But, what made these posts blow up was the fact that one of the men listed as a partner in Quinn’s alleged affairs was a journalist at Kotaku, a well known gaming news site. Both he and Quinn denied the allegations, but by the time they spoke out, it was too late: gamers were already posting on websites like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan about the (non-proven) breaches in journalistic ethics that the two engaged in.
While many proponents of Gamergate claimed that the movement was a response to these allegations, about ethics in gaming journalism, what followed demonstrated that Gamergate was about nothing of the sort. Soon after the accusational blog posts went up, hackers posted Quinn’s personal information, including nude pictures and personal address. The threats to Quinn and their specificity intensified so much Quinn ended up leaving home and alerting the police.
Within days of the inital posts and threats targeted at Quinn, feminist writer and critic Anita Sarkeesian was targeted by individuals under the Gamergate banner, who sent threats to her as well. Like Quinn, she left her home out of a fear. Shortly after Sarkeesian was attacked, two other women who wrote about Quinn and Sarkeesian were targeted. Mattie Brice, a game designer, and Jenn Frank, a journalist, announced they were leaving the industry over the harassment they received as a result of their writings. Frank, in an article she wrote for the Guardian, suggested that what Gamergate was really about was anger over criticisms regarding the patriarchal, male-dominated culture that persists throughout the industry.
Some of the threats were bad enough to warrant FBI began investigations. The FBI’s report can be found here, The Verge’s coverage of the report can be found here. Many of the individuals who sent these threats were anonymous, though in many cases they were noted as organizing their attacks on websites like 4chan and 8chan, the latter of which became a hub of Gamergate activity after 4chan banned users who used the site to plan harassment.
The tactics that trolls employed in Gamergate were some of the first instances on the internet of death, rape, and bomb threats targeted at specific individuals over differences in ideology, all of which have become recognized as standard practices for online trolls and groups that support them, such as the alt-right. Doxxing, the practice of releasing a person’s private information onto the internet without their consent, became much more popular after Gamergate. Memes were another important part of the movement too, a concept that was originally a way to craft jokes around a premade format became a form of propaganda as trolls made GamerGate memes to reflect their opinions and ideologies. GamerGate memes attacked and mocked journalists and feminists over their views, and many of them came from groups that were all-too-ready to commit acts of hate.
Neo-nazi and alt-right groups have existed on the internet for a long time, but with Gen Z’s coming of age as the first generation to not know a world without the internet, more and more of these groups are adopting members who are not only tech-literate, but have only existed in a time where technology was their primary mode of communication. As such, many alt-right groups have adopted the internet and formed communities based around such things as a desire to harass and bully women.
Social media contributes to this, the aforementioned 4chan and 8chan were cesspools of Gamergate trolls, but other websites hosted them as well. Websites like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook all had communities or at least individuals who participated and organized Gamergate attacks, and the fact that the companies that owned these websites were either slow to respond or never responded at all was a major reason for things getting as bad as they did. Reddit in particular, with its subculture-based design, proved fertile ground for alt-right groups to coalesce on, and was a major source of the hate that Gamergate spewed.
As Gamergate trolls were given support by alt-right groups in the early stages of their respective developments, a new kind of individual began to emerge. A decade ago, trolls were jerks who said racist and mean things on forums and in video-game voice chats. But with GamerGate, they became politically-charged threats to the safety of both individuals (such as Quinn and Sarkeesian) but also to minorities as a whole.
Gamer gate eventually expanded outside of the gaming realm; figures like alt-right commentator Mike Cernovich initially participated in Gamergate and worked closely with Alex Jones and Infowars. He was an integral part of the Pizzagate conspiracy and the internet conspiracy theores attacking Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election campaign. Milo Yiannopoulos was a blogger who never played video games, but he joined the mobs in denouncing feminists during the Gamergate movement and gained enough popularity from doing so that he was recruited by Breitbart news as a major writer. These figures and the people who followed them moved on to comment on bigger issues, they were given a voice that was unprecedented on the internet in terms of the amount of support they had and the hatred they fomented.
By the time of the 2016 election, Gamergate was already a couple of years old, which meant that the tactics and people that it bred were ready and prepared to start something new. As coverage of the election’s two primary candidates — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — became more and more prominent in the news, journalists who covered Trump in a negative light became the new targets, receiving similar threats that Quinn, Sarkeesian, and others had received two years prior. Many of these messages were sent under similar guises — ad hominem attacks mixed with criticisms over journalistic integrity.
Journalists who covered Trump in a negative light became the new targets, receiving similar threats that Quinn, Sarkeesian, and others had received two years prior.
The rise of the alt-right as a political faction with significant influence also occurred around this time coincided with the Gamergate phenomenon. Targeted harassment, the creation of conservative political memes, doxxing, were prominent weapons of war as uber-conservatives attacked Hillary Clinton and pledged their support for Donald Trump.
The past few months have seen alt-right groups increase in activity, numbers, and loudness as the 2020 election gets closer and closer. With groups like the Proud Boys pushing people to become poll watchers at local election polls, to armed alt-right groups marching on the streets of major U.S. cities, the expansion of the ultra-conservative movement has seen a dramatic rise in activity over the past four years. These groups are dangerous not only because of the physical intimidation tactics that they employ, but because many of them are also much more tech-savvy than those that came before them. Gamer gate was a catalyst for this movement towards anti-progressivism amongst a subculture of young people, many of whom joined groups as a way to find like-minded people with similar goals and values.
Online conspiracies like Pizzagate” and “QAnon” are extensions of things like Gamergate; controversies with little backing that are headed by extremists with enough knowledge of technology and the internet to spread these ideas and recruit more people to their cause. Both of these conspiracies are rooted in anti-feminist ideas, largely in how they portray Hillary Clinton and Democrats as devil-worshiping child traffickers. GamerGate, though not as conceptually outlandish as say, Pizzagate or QAnon, was a proving ground for tactics t weaponized internet-based disinformation and trolling. The fact that alt-right groups were to get traction with Americans for these conspiracies is a testament to how dangerous and how influential they can be.
The 2020 election will decide the country’s fate for not only the next four years, but for the foreseeable future of the country. It is, in some ways, a referendum on the power of GamerGate-type tactics to curdle American discourse and threaten democracy. Stay tuned.
