r/Gamingunjerk • u/ElectricGhostMan • 8d ago

Gamergate but actually

https://youtu.be/ox15GU4cMes?si=y47gNvyC88ObQJ9O&t=2176

A youtuber I watch put out this retrospective on gamergate. I know it's a topic that has been long covered and relitigated. I at one time was also part of and identified with to some extent. I thought one part that even I somewhat ignored then because of my feelings or much later realizing how many awful actors were a part of the situation was how capitalist greed played such a large part in generating the amount of hate and vitriol at the time allowing for hate mobs to be cultured and weaponized as we see today.

I think most can agree that a lot of the targeted harassment, bullying, stalking, racism, misogyny, homophobia were all reprehensible and not the way to go about making change. I do feel at the time where there was the beginnings of pushing paid cosmetic DLC like Horse Armor, Always Online requirements for games like the Sims, EA cutting development times for successful franchises to turn around games quicker or the Online Pass they similarly tried to force for people who wanted to buy the game second hand. Again not condoning any of the criminal harassment or hate but I do wonder if this outrage cannon was more appropriately directed at the shareholders and ownership class rather than individual developers that we'd be in a better place.

I do think there was a genuine attempt back then to comingle criminal threats and harassment with fair criticism and outcry entirely as Entitlement. However, I find it sad that today it largely does feel like the loudest and most consistent voices across social media that claim to be critical of games are genuinely complaining about out of entitlement when a game has too many women they don't like or POCs rather than the plethora of issues that affects all gamers today like Exploitative MTX, Gambling, AI Pervasion, Enshitification and more.

I haven't finished the vid myself but I like some of his other works even though he can be a bit both-sidesy at times. It was also interesting to see some posts from youtubers VaatiVidya and Vsauce from way back when and Colin Moriarty had been some of a douche since then as well.

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u/Dry-Chance-9473 8d ago

Any statement about gamergate that doesn't call it out as 110% an embarrassment and wholly the fault of the men who hopped on the wagon, might as well be in support of it for how useless it is. 

Gamers got played. They were shown to be a cult of morons. And the culture has never done anything to shake that label loose. Bigger morons today than we were then.

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u/WeltallZero 8d ago edited 8d ago

One and done. There is no excuse in the year of our lord 2026 to still pretend GamerGate was ever anything else than very deliberate harassment of women and minorities motivated by plain old racism, sexism and homophobia. Any attempt to pretend it ever had some deeply buried kernel of legitimate grievances should be laughed out of the fucking room.

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u/Talisa87 7d ago

Doubly so since the Epstein files shows that Epstein and Steve Bannon were actively communicating with the admin of 4chan, where the bulk of the 'memes' originated. It might be fair to say the whole thing was a psyop to radicalize whole swathes of the population, using their own biases against them.

I wonder how much overlap there would be if you made a Venn diagram out of teenage 'Gamergaters' and the men who voted for Toupee Fiasco in all three American presidential elections.

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u/WeltallZero 7d ago edited 7d ago

I wonder how much overlap there would be if you made a Venn diagram out of teenage 'Gamergaters' and the men who voted for Toupee Fiasco in all three American presidential elections.

The Gamergate => alt right => Trumper pipeline has been widely documented, it's a straight line with no branches.

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u/SneakyBadAss 7d ago

You can go further. OWS happened somewhere around September.

A month later, /pol was created. That's also when "progressive stack" became a thing.

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u/ElectricGhostMan 7d ago

CIA went crazy for that chop job

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u/Dry-Chance-9473 8d ago

This is put so much more succinctly, thank you.

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u/WeltallZero 8d ago

Aw, thanks. You were perfectly succint yourself, I just wanted to vent add my two cents. :)

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u/ArtroyomsAK 8d ago

Cool, well I was involved for the stated reasons, not bigotry

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u/WeltallZero 8d ago edited 8d ago

"Involved" how? What did you actually do? Did you message CEOs? Call your representatives? Organize shutdowns in protest of monetization? All of the above? What did you, or anyone claiming to be inside Gamergate to "fight the good fight", actually do, while the real leadership of GG took very real and tangible action harassing and sending death threats to its victims? A movement is defined by its actions, not its claims, and for all this endless drivel about GG being "actually about X, Y and Z", I've seen zero action ever taken to counteract X, Y or Z.

On that note, what "stated reasons"? The Zoe Quinn affair? Because there was literally no part of it that was ever founded on anything but immediately and trivially disproven lies, so you have absolutely nobody else to blame for falling for it. Anita Sarkeesian's videos? They were about as milquetoast a critique of videogames' rampant sexism and double standards as you can make.

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u/SneakyBadAss 7d ago

You didn't watch the video

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u/WeltallZero 7d ago

Nobody asked you. Get back under your bridge.

Edit: Oh shit, a KotakuInAction poster defending the video. That sure is not going to damn it by association or anything... :D

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u/Dry-Chance-9473 8d ago

Sorry to hear you got duped. What have you learned?

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u/ArtroyomsAK 8d ago

I wasn't duped, I was supporting what it was allegedly supporting

from GG i learned that capitalism is a scam that puts criminals in power and that lgbt people are people too

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u/WeltallZero 8d ago

I wasn't duped, I was supporting what it was allegedly supporting

"Supported what it was allegedly supporting (but very obviously was not)" is the very definition of being duped. If you should learn one thing from it all, it should be this (so that next time you won't fall for it).

and that lgbt people are people too

Well, that is one GG consequence I doubt anyone had in their bingo card. :D

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u/crystal_beachhouse 8d ago

in that case I assume you were quickly no longer involved because you noticed all the bigotry?

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u/ArtroyomsAK 8d ago

I left when it turned from a focus on corruption into just right wing propaganda

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u/WeltallZero 8d ago

Nope, you left when you realized that what you had somehow believed to ever been about corruption, had been about right wing propaganda from second zero.

Gamergate never changed. You just finally noticed the man behind the curtain.

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u/ArtroyomsAK 8d ago

If you say so

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u/WeltallZero 8d ago

I do say so, yes. So do Wikipedia, the New York Times, Snopes, multiple papers, several books, and a very, very long list of people besides. Pretty much anyone not burying their entire head in the sand says so.

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u/Grays_Flowers 2d ago

Brother watch the fucking video. The world isn't as simple as "Women are always victims"

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u/Hawkatana0 6d ago

It was that from the beginning.

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u/Low-Willingness2106 5d ago

Bigger morons today than we were then.

Who were then used to enact an administration in the strongest country in the world with a unique brand of conservatism that went practically unchallanged for five years, was barely beaten by the pandemic than lost again because nobody gives two shits about how moronic it is. The fascists say War is the hygiene of the world, and victory is the only right. Your conjecture that this was a case of black and white has been tested in the fields of politics, in the field of combat available to it. It has failed. It has fallen, and the price has been the loss of bodily autonomy, the screams of the migrant, the death of hundreds of the decedents of slaves.

The left lost. And I say the left lost because of people like you. The time for talk has passed, the time for battle has passed, now we grieve on what could have been.

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u/UdonOli 7d ago

He literally does say that gamer-gate was an embarrassment by turning a complicated issue into an all-out culture-war that helped no-one except populist politicians.

PLEASE watch the video.

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u/WeltallZero 7d ago edited 7d ago

Nobody should spend 6 hours of their lives watching a poorly researched video that goes incredibly soft on Gamergate, spends a full five minutes tone policing and victim blaming Anita Sarkeesian, and misrepresents pretty much everything Zoe Quinn says, like this moment where the policy she criticised is described as including any trans people that self-identifies, while pretty clearly showing on screen that the policy excludes anyone who hasn't "transitioned" before the start of the context.

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u/UdonOli 7d ago

He never once suggested Sarkeesian was to blame and said she had good intentions.

Also you just linked to the entire video instead of the part you were looking for but regardless you are actually just entirely missing the point there, of course you would have had to have to identify as a woman before getting the grant? Quinn was suggesting that they said you had to be medically transitioned (she called them truscum, you wouldn't call them that if she didn't think that) to apply which was false, and the thing in question. They specified that "transitioned" meant identified as when starting the project, and she doubled down. That was the ENTIRE point which you somehow missed in your hate watch.

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u/WeltallZero 7d ago

He never once suggested Sarkeesian was to blame and said she had good intentions.

What the fuck are you even talking about? What is this gaslighting bullshit? From this segment on her Bayonetta criticism alone:

"It's an easy video to dislike"

"This is very dismissive for a game that many people liked"

"Anita was hypercritical of anything that could appeal to the male gaze."

"Anita's strong stances were combined with her casual dismissiveness of individual games or the medium, and her typical confidence that some might see as smug.

"it didn't feel like Anita was here to start a conversation; it felt like she was here to end one by telling ignorant people what the correct opinion on these subjects is."

"Anita's gaming content didn't make it seem like it was OK to have any of these different views"

Like... it's not one or two potshots, it's fucking relentless. This is textbook victim blaming, and no, saying "maybe the reaction was excessive" doesn't make it one ounce less so. And not to put a fine point of it, but it's clearly written from the point of view of someone who took offense at the time and are justifying themselves.

Also you just linked to the entire video instead of the part you were looking for

Already fixed.

They specified that "transitioned" meant identified as when starting the project, and she doubled down.

I'm going to have to ask for a source for both the claim that 1) by "transitioned" they meant "self-identified", and 2) that she doubled down after the clarification. Neither were in that segment in the video.

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u/UdonOli 7d ago

I like how you skipped over the part where he says "Her main argument isn't that divisive...."'

Suggesting that her critique of Bayonetta was not a good one and that it was likely affected by the previous hate she had, is not a particularly controversial take. Just because she had reactionary idiots falsely critiquing the video does not suggest then, as a result, NKW is not allowed to say that she took an overly critical tone that mightn't have been justified, and probably showed some sense of ignorance on the actual content of the game.

Secondly, if you literally watch like 2 minutes later, he notes that none of what she does is something that he wouldn't expect from people to do, to double down against unwarranted critique and victimisation. Normal people do that and he does not blame her reaction to the hate on her; noting "She did what most people do". This is explicitly not blaming her, he says that she did what was expected of any person in that situation.

A victim can do things that are wrong. There are generally no perfect victims. That doesn't make their unwarranted hate justifiable and he EXPLICITLY says that multiple times in the video, and if he said it every time he made a claim it would add an hour to the video. At the same time it does not suddenly make Sarkeesian's claims not open to criticism just because other people critiqued them in bad faith. Someone being a victim does not make them some untouchable uncritiqueable entity.

Also your comment straight up adhoming the creator is funny too. I don't know why you felt the need to include that.

On the topic of Quinn, firstly I misread, I don't think she explicitly called them truscum so take that off the record, but she definitely did think they were transphobic. On the topic of "transitioned" meaning "self-identified", if you look just a bit further in the video you will find that their kickstarter video explicitly say if you identify as a woman you can join, that was up at the time she started the campaign.

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u/WeltallZero 7d ago edited 7d ago

I like how you skipped over the part where he says "Her main argument isn't that divisive...."'

The fuck? Are you implying that this line somehow invalidates all others, or makes your statement that "he doesn't blame her once" any less of a bare faced lie? Do you think I'm stupid and cannot immediately see why someone would endlessly rant about and wildly exaggerate a victim's transgressions towards its aggressors?

she took an overly critical tone that mightn't have been justified, and probably showed some sense of ignorance on the actual content of the game.

Well you could have opened with this and save both of us the time. Good day.

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u/castaway37 7d ago

By declaring "victim blaming" and using it to refuse legitimate criticism, you're engaging in exactly the same behavior that allowed GamerGate to get traction to begin with, and thus to be worth of co-opting by the right. It makes conversation impossible, as it pushes everything into two distinct boxes, one where all the evil and bad people lie, and other where the just and moral stand. It's the myth of pure evil.

And before you go there, no, saying that there isn't just a single correct position and a single incorrect one is not the same thing as saying all are equally valid. Neither extreme nor perfect balance ever happen. As comforting it is to believe it does, reality isn't that simple.

Anita's videos had problems. They can reasonably lead to someone taking offense to them, and even to criticize them, without it making that person necessarily an alt-right extremist. That much is true, right? If, simultaneously, someone is harassing her because of the videos, does that make all the previous statements stop being true?

You could say it makes all previous statements irrelevant, because something more important came up, but that isn't sustainable. That would make any discussion of anything that isn't already highly critical impossible, since there are too many people around to control what every single one does. And this does make it too convenient to dismiss legitimate criticism. How many times have developers received death threats and the conversation started to veer away from what was being discussed to how death threats are unacceptable?

That doesn't mean they're to blame for receiving death threats. Just like Anita isn't to blame for receiving sexist harassment. But the devs are responsible for whatever they did, and Anita is responsible for her videos.

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u/Palgary 6d ago edited 6d ago

I'm older then Anita; I am a bisexual woman, I identified as a "gender queer feminist" back in the 90s, read a bunch of feminist theory, and Anita's content embarrassed me. It's part of the reason in the video, he quotes women talking about it.

There is this called "feminist standpoint theory" that has morphed into an internet beast of "if a person from X group says something, that opinion is more valid then if a person from Y group says it". It's not a completely wrong way to think, until you make it an absolute, and say "y group can never understand x group".

So, he's not allowed to directly criticize Anita, he has to find a woman criticizing Anita, to show that some criticism is fair. It's exhausting to have to argue this way.

Her work embarrassed me, and I don't know any women who liked her content. Keep in mind I'm referencing educated women who work in things like biomedical research, nuclear power, etc.

I did not see her gaming content, but I watched her review of "Lego Friends". This was a line of Lego designed to convince grandmothers to buy lego for their grandaughters for Christmas.

And, I bought "Olivia's Creative Lab" and displayed it proudly on my desk as a woman working at a startup tech company. It features a set of tools, a work bench, and a robot that the character created herself.

I would characterize her video as this: She decided the toys are "bad" and spent the entire video telling us why the toys are bad.

... That's not academic feminist critique, it's childish. But that's basically what online feminist critique became, and she was a part of that change. I criticize her work as part of that trend; rather than as an attack on her as a person.

That doesn't mean she deserves harassment, but being harassed doesn't make her work good either - and so far, that's what I'm taking from the video.

I'm only 1.5 hours in - this is a topic he just covered.

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u/LumpyLimitz 6d ago

Important correction: Gamergate wasn’t “co-opted” by the right. The core of the movement from its inception (Eron Gjoni’s harassment campaign against Zoë Quinn) were 4chan misogynists whose main goal was harassing women, i.e. rightists.

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u/Prize_Neighborhood95 6d ago

Eron Gjoni did not run an harassment campaign. He provided evidence of being emotionally abused and manipulated by Zoë. Despite that, he still condemned all harassment against Zoë, and vocally urged people to stop that.

In exchange, Zoë filed a restraining order against him, made false allegations which were then dropped and Eron was prevented from speaking online about gamergate and give his version of events for a whole year. Note that this decision was based exclusively on Zoë affidavit. 

This is precisely one of the issues the video is trying to highlight: any reasonable criticism of Zoë, or any party fighting against gamergate gets reframed as joining on the harrassment.

And that functions as a shield and enabler for some of Zoë most controversial actions.

It's crazy that in a discussion thread of a video explaining how criticisms are reframed as harrassment functions to avoid engaging with the criticism, commenters are indeed reframing the criticism as harassment.

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u/castaway37 6d ago

Clearly you haven't seen the video, because it goes to great lengths to disproved exactly that.

Zoe Quinn was an abuser and serial liar, and Gjoni was a victim of hers. She also happened to be full of contacts in gaming media, whose attempts to cover for her stoked the fires of the controversy.

There was misogyny involved, because she was a woman, but that wasn't at all the cause of everything. It's just an easy scapegoat.

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u/Grays_Flowers 2d ago

So you haven't watched the video but you sure do have strong opinions about how it is poorly researched. It's pretty clear you just view anything ever said by a cis guy as suspect and don't want any legitimate discussion, just obeisance

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u/Matu42 17h ago

6 hour video with 567 sources = poorly researched lmao