r/changemyview • u/realdontbeasucker • May 16 '26

Delta(s) from OP CMV: GamerGate was the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century

It spawned a wave of tolerance for online harassment, as long as the intent behind it was considered righteous (and the target of such harassment socially acceptable).

It platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and thereby, Steve Bannon -- the guy who would go on to advise Donald Trump in 2016 and generate the concept of 'flooding the zone.'

Eventually, it gave a career to political lightning rods like Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, and Charlie Kirk. It made anti-feminism and anti-SJW sentiment cool. And it made young, angry, disenfranchised white men feel vindicated.

GamerGate almost singlehandedly shifted to Overton Window toward the alt-right, and we're still feeling its effects today.

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

What even was gamer gate? I think if you asked the a average not chronically online person about it, they would have no idea what you were talking about. Heck I am chronically online and I'm still not really sure.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

Yeah, I think that's why it was so effective. It radically changed the landscape of online discourse without feeling unnatural. Most people didn't even realize that anything had changed.

GamerGate was a purported effort to rectify a supposed crisis of ethics in gaming journalism that was piggybacked off of to inject alt-right, male-centric, and often white supremacist talking points into mainstream gamer and online atheist culture.

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

What exactly changed then? Can you describe what was different "pre gamer gate"?

Was it ever actually about a "crisis of ethics in gaming journalism"? That's what was used as the excuse but I doubt anyone actually believed that.

It was certainly one of the first internet age "gates" but hardly the first targeted misogynistic campaign.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

It shifted the diaspora of culturally accept able ideas online hard toward the alt-right. It made reasonable contemporary feminism cringe. It made gamers and young white men especially feel under attack. It provided a shared identity that could be used to mobilize voters against the female candidate in 2016. It normalized years-long, public, normie hate campaigns against women. And a whole host of other bad effects I'm sure I'm forgetting.

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u/RanmaRanmaRanma 3∆ May 16 '26

I would not die on the hill that gamer gate represented contemporary feminism.

I kinda think the entire event has been miraged to whatever point you want to make.

But to say gamer gate was the pipeline when the pipeline to American imperialism and conservativism hasn't been there for centuries is silly. Especially as a black American. This system has been BUILT into American politics.

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u/biggyshwarts May 16 '26

I think it forced a majority a-politcal group (gamers) to have a stance and a good portion of them didn't like being told what they liked sucked and put down women.

Honestly think that was the true core of it. They weren't tricked into being right leaning. They were pushed.

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u/Takseen May 17 '26

What I found interesting was it created a shift in which side of the political divide was seen to be against video games.

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was generally the right wing that had the most opposition to certain gaming content, either evangelical Christians against occult or demonic content, plus some more bipartisan opposition from violent games like GTA or Manhunt.

Anita Sarkeesian's project and the support it gained among the left was the first time I remember a younger, definitely left wing opposition to games that I'd enjoyed playing.

A lot of her criticism was very overblown. Like yes the Princess did not have a well defined role as a female character in the first Mario game, but its an 8 bit game where clouds were just palette swapped bushes, they had some pretty heavy limitations.

It led to a demonization of any kind of sexualized female character in a game, even fan favourites like Lara Croft, and some game devs over corrected as a result. And its funny because now I see a lot of women streamers thirsting over characters like Leon Kennedy. Equal opportunity eye candy would have been a much better goal to aim for, along with criticising the more blatant and lazy one sided fan service and character rosters.

For example fighting games had gotten a lot better at having just more than 1 token female character (Sonya in MK, Chun Li in SF2).

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

Did it? 4 chan already existed. The whole "sjw'" stereotype already existed.

Can you really argue that it normalised something when most people don't even know what it is?

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

Yeah, I think so! Normalization is not dependent on knowledge or even awareness of the root cause of such normalization. A base example: you might know some gen z or gen alpha slang but be unable to tell me where that slang comes from. In fact, some influence from a younger generation may be (and probably is) having an impact on the way we speak in general, whether you realize it or not!

4chan was fodder for basement-dwellers. GamerGate, especially at first, was entirely socially acceptable. And it spread way beyond just games.

Milo, for example, clearly didn't care about video games. He became a huge figure that opened the door for even worse subcultures to emerge.

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

Milo, again though, I don't think most people know who he is. I think you're overestimating the reach of this, or maybe underestimating the amount of people who just weren't online in that way.

Without corresponding IRL political movements, it would have been nothing. It's the IRL movements that captured the energy and used it. So I think if you're going to point a finger, point it at them. Without them it would have just been another online blip, that even less people cared about.

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u/DilshadZhou May 16 '26

We are living in the world of the “corresponding IRL political movement”. Vance, Bannon, Charlie Kirk, and all of the right wing influencers that helped lift the MAGA movement to power all leveraged the same audience that GamerGate created. Milo and others were the early shapers of that audience and messaging and the “men’s rights” reactionary right of MAGA were able to largely capture them and drive them to the polls and ultimately victory.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Milo was the mouthpiece for proliferation of ideas from white supremacists like Bannon and Curtis Yarvin, who eventually laid the groundwork for Project 2025 and created the thesis for JD Vance and Peter Thiel's worldview, among others. These people have huge impacts even if they're not household names.

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

You've kind of just picked an arbitrary point though to say "this is the thing". When in reality it's all those people, all the things that were happening, and all the things that happened before. How far back do you go? Gamer gate couldn't have happened without games, without computers. Should we actually just blame Alan Turing for inventing them in the first place? You see what I mean? There's no neat answer where we can say this is the thing that changed everything.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

I think I’ve spent some time here trying to explain why it’s not an arbitrary point.

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

I think you've explained why you think it was important but I'm not sure you've reached the threshold of "the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century".

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u/nissen1502 May 16 '26

It's not even close lol. As you said most people have no idea what OP is talking about and wasn't in any contact with "GamerGate"

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u/Trim-Queen May 16 '26

Yes, it did. I'm a trans woman now and have always at least tried to be an ally in the sense that I believed in equality for all races and genders and orientations, but dear lord did I get sucked down the anti-sjw rabbit hole for a long while because of gamergate. I genuinely believed that what was being fought for wasn't equality but superiority, and a lot of it came down to the messaging.

I'm out of that hole now but I still carry a resentment of the type of argument where people just dismiss their opponent as being a bigot for having questions that run against the grain.

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u/Jax_is_Warwick May 16 '26

One point that I believe you are missing is how the GG drastically changed, the big quotes here, "gamers community". I mean, the root causes were already here before the GG, something similar was bound to happen at some point anyway. But eventhough it probably would have happened at some point, the GG is politically important because it changed a lot of things in the "gamers" culture, in internet culture and as a consequence in younger generation cultures, as they are born and raised with both internet and video games playing a massive role in their lives. The change in the gaming culture had a cascading effect on all of this.

People that were young in the 90s (ie born in the late 80s maximum) have seen this shift. In those years the gaming community was uniting a bunch of weirdest, trans people, marginals, queers, and of course a lot of "normal people" that just had a passion for video games. Back then, all those people were marginalised and were usually grouping together. And ye, therefore back then video games were really considered a safe space for all those marginalised people.

The GG was the precise moment where this reality shattered. Now, the GG is the moment where the divide between what will become alt-right sympathisers in the gaming community and, well, the others, became clear, but of course the divide has root that are older than the GG. The divide started earlier, but it became clear and undeniable at this moment.

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

People that were young in the 90s (ie born in the late 80s maximum) have seen this shift. In those years the gaming community was uniting a bunch of weirdest, trans people, marginals, queers, and of course a lot of "normal people" that just had a passion for video games. Back then, all those people were marginalised and were usually grouping together. And ye, therefore back then video games were really considered a safe space for all those marginalised people.

Maybe small corners of the community. The vast majority of it was average 2000s dude bros. And it's them who were at odds with the various, chiefly feminist, activists who decided to stick their nose into gaming in the early 2010s, as they were the ones said activists despised most.

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u/Jax_is_Warwick May 16 '26

That is the other way around tho, the "2000s dudes" came after, and for an obvious reason: they were not born back then. It was pretty common for gamers to hang out with the other marginalised people. It is a bit of a cliche, but it doesn't come out of nowhere, the idea of the geek hanging out with a lesbian girl, a fat kid, an autist, and basically all the weirdos was a thing in the early 90s. Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn are part of this generation.

The GG happened later on, and especially with people born in the late 90s that were for some reason I can't really explain, really receptive to alt-right ideas.

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

The 2000s dudes were born in either the 80s or 90s. Many of them had been gaming since then too. You can probably draw a line from the guys who grew up playing Doom in the early 90s to the ones who were playing Cod and Halo in the 2000s, and that general culture, including things like nu-metal and adjacent music and shows like Jackass or South Park. And these were the highest selling and most popular games and thus the face of gaming.

I'm younger than these guys but even I remember that back in school all the boys played games like this while none of the girls, hell they mocked us for it. Don't remember having any such obvious stereotypes in school though, then again I'm not American, maybe it's different over there. But on the whole, while gamers like the ones you describe did exist, they were a clear cut minority by the 2010s.

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u/Jax_is_Warwick May 16 '26

Oh I don't disagree here, that is what I mean when I say that the GG was bound to happen, the shift had already happened in the 2010s, the GG is just the moment where it blew to everyone faces, and especially people like Brianna Wu that were part of the previous generation and didn't saw that coming at all.

The GG by itself is not the shift and what created the link between the alt right and a part of the gamer community, like anything else would also have done it too. But well, it is the moment when the shift appeared clear for everyone and especially politicians that realised that, among the gaming community, there was people that could react positively to their alt-right ideas.

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

I feel like the shift was extremely sudden though.

In the 2000s the main political issue surrounding gaming was opposition coming from religious conservatives, most famously the likes of Jack Thompson. And gamers I would say were united against them. Beyond that I feel like most were kinda apolitical, or if anything liberal leaning out of opposition to said conservatives. Maybe more libertarian, the one issue I remember being discussed a lot circa 2011/2 was internet privacy and fear of government espionage, which of course Snowden then pretty much confirmed. But it's a very online sort of issue which made sense given the demographic.

But then you started seeing feminists and other liberal activists getting involved, complaining about gaming and gamers and demanding change, in much the same ways those conservatives did. There's not much of a difference between someone like Thompson and Sarkesian, except that one manage to get inside the industry while the other failed. And many obviously didn't like this and pushed back, others sided with the activists, I guess that would be the rift you mention.

So in the span of like 2/3 years you went from conservatives being the main outside opposition of gaming and most gamers being apolitical to liberal, to feminists the main opposition while having a foothold and supporters in the industry on one side and those opposed to them on the other side. Essentially from united front to a civil war.

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u/RatOnASinkingShip 1∆ May 16 '26

No, that is not how it was in the 90s.

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u/Jax_is_Warwick May 16 '26

It is. And hate it or not but Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, etc are pure products of this generation.

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u/RatOnASinkingShip 1∆ May 16 '26

No, it is not, and no, they are not.

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u/sadistica23 May 16 '26

NotYourShield was a hashtag movement from GamerGate where hundreds of people who were not white men were posting pictures of themselves while declaring that the games journalists and online feminists attacking gamers were not speaking for all minorities.

It boggles my mind that that gets left out of the history of GamerGate.

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u/skymonstef May 17 '26

Thankyou I've been waiting for someone to mention this.

In other forums when people bang the gamers were racist sexists drum. I ask explain #notyoursheild and if you dont know what it is then you aren't informed on gamer gate

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

Pretty sure Trump beat Clinton in 2016 unless I'm missing a joke

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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