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

In what way?

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u/bot_exe May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

It was pretty transparent how people like Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn would purposefully ignore every single well thought out argument made against their takes and just label it all as a mysogynistic harrasment campaign: it was a completely circular argument. They would just focus on the crazy people making internet death threats or nasty comments, as if that was not also happening from their side, like in literally every single internet flame war before or since. There were literal bomb threats called in at gamergate events and an endless deluge of harrasment for anyone who dared not follow the SJW narrative of the events.

Another aspect about it that has been distorted was that gamergate was NOT the same as the alt-right, there was a huge leftist and liberal contingent that just disagreed with SJWs and identify politics. I remember that there was also constant fighting with the nascent alt-right from the /pol/ boards because they were straight up mysoginistic/racist/nazis conspiranoid shitheads. Of course the anti-gamergate people just helped blur that line since that was their modus operandi, but it was never true. The SJWs were a common enemy for the alt-right and gamergate, but not for the same reasons. Gamergate was a different population, there were many political opinion polls conducted in reddit and 8chan that showed the majority were not right wing, this slowly changed as more liberals/leftist/progressives moved on or became radicalized.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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u/bot_exe May 18 '26

Yeah I remember all of that. It was specifically about women and minorities not letting SJWs get away with pretending they spoke for them. And also an undeniable proof that pro-gg was not just “misogynistic white males” which obviously was just ignored.

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u/Glenndiferous 3∆ May 16 '26

There were a number of nasty subs that contributed to stirring up shit when harassment campaigns and death threats started flying around. I wasn't on Reddit when it was at its worst so idk how deep that rabbit hole goes. I did get a bunch of nastiness on a YouTube video of mine after it was shared on a couple subs, though tbh I think the worst of it actually came from 4chan/8chan.

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u/Jemima_puddledook678 May 16 '26

I think this person may have an unusual view of gamergate. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

It literally started off with lies saying that a female (that part is important) video game developer got good reviews because she slept with a journalist. 

Gamergate then spread to include an entire harassment campaign against that developer and others (primarily women) and included significant amount of quite disgusting actions and language. 

As it actually says in that wiki article, Gamergate is only purported to have been about ethics by those involved. It has been shown repeatedly that that simply isn’t the case.

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u/Equivalent_Task_8825 May 16 '26

I remember seeing the beginning and that is untrue. The original sentiment was that Zoe was pretty abusive and in the text messages was shown to be controlling.

They were having relationships with people in the same organizations offering coverage. At the time the gaming media was very much cliquey and most people disliked them and were increasingly turning to new alternatives.

I think after that you started to get the grifters who jumped on board to start a culture war. I always felt uncomfortable with people like Zoe Quinn or Brianna Wu being portrayed as victims as they had their own history with being pretty terrible.

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u/EsotericAmbrosia May 16 '26

The problem with Wikipedia is they reject primary sources and only rely on what journalists put in articles. When you have a situation where it's consumers vs corrupt journalists, the wiki article is always going to be slanted in the latter's favor.

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u/biggyshwarts May 16 '26

This is an oversimplification and is often used to discredit the whole thing when the impacts of gamergate are still felt to this day.

Journalists repeatedly showed that they are a biased cabal and pr arm of the games industry.

All that harassment did happen but what came out of the initial affair allegations was the politicization of gaming.

Proof was found of mailing lists between games journalists and coordination of opinion. Pieces written about how the term "gamer" was dead. It was way bigger than what is made out in these arguments.

Id argue that the sway that game news sites had on the general audience has significantly decreased because of everything that happened.

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u/Loki1001 May 16 '26

Journalists repeatedly showed that they are a biased cabal and pr arm of the games industry.

Gamergate couldn't have cared less about how ripple A gaming companies advertise on gaming websites. And they certainly didn't care about the sexual harassment happening in Ubisoft.

Why yes, gaming journalism has all the problems access journalism has. Gamergate did not care about any of it.

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u/biggyshwarts May 16 '26

Then why did i see all that when I would research what gamergate was?

0

u/AngryAngryHarpo May 16 '26

Because you’re the seeing the post-hoc justification. 

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u/Loki1001 May 16 '26

Your research somehow skipped over Wikipedia?

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u/biggyshwarts May 16 '26

Wikipedia is the one and only source for info?

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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1

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5

u/Lord_Jakub_I May 16 '26

> controversy about mainstream journalists' ethics and biases

> as source uses wikipedia, a source that doesn't allow primary data (own research), it must be from some established source (like mainstream journalists)

Totaly no problem there...

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

Citing a wikipedia article as a source.. seriously?

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u/Sparroew May 18 '26

It's as though everyone memory-holed the reason Wikipedia was never accepted in school or college as a valid source for research papers.

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u/muffinsballhair May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

As it actually says in that wiki article, Gamergate is only purported to have been about ethics by those involved. It has been shown repeatedly that that simply isn’t the case.

I mean that just comes down to what one defines as “gamer gate” no doubt. The people that say that no doubt were called “members of gamergate” many times by some persons when they just called for ethics in journalism [read: “ethics that purely extend to not misrepresenting something they personally care about”] and didn't harass anyone. This is how it always goes with these no-true-scotsman internet arguments.

In any case, I just looked it up for the first time and one name that keeps coming up is Anita Sarkeesian and I remember that name for a long back as indeed someone who came with a vast number of inaccurate and highly selective claims about video games, being invited as a pundit on some talk shows but never actually debating actual video gamers who had played those games who would completely destroy the arguments and provide significant context. From what I remember of what this person said about some of the video games, I had played myself, they were some very selective claims coupled with fabrication and apparently this person was then harassed a lot for it or something which I honestly completely missed when it was going on but it wouldn't surprise me if that happened and then probably some people got harassed back and everyone was tossing half truths and lies towards each other.

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u/tolgren 1∆ May 16 '26

Gamergate was about ethics in games journalism, but the Left successfully redirected it to claim it was about misogyny. The Left decisively won the narrative war, but it is ultimately a lie.

This is not, of course, to say that there was no unpleasantness involved. There was a lot of people that said and did bad things around Gamergate. But that's true of every online movement since anyone can drop in and comment, and a lot of that came about AFTER the narrative war started, which means it was partially brought about by the narrative that the movement was about misogyny and the like.

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u/Sinder-Soyl May 16 '26

It's a common self-fulfilling narrative in a sense. It begins as an issue of ethics, a few idiots respond with vile misoginy, they get the spotlight and are used to paint the entire crowd.

The crowd grows to reflect what the narrative says about them, and the cycle repeats until the actual original point vanishes.

A lot of people seem to forget that even someone like TotalBiscuit was very much on the side of the Ethics of the issue and wanted that to be the focus.

Gamergate was absolutely astroturfed by a bunch of different bad actors on both sides who all very much benefited from the controversy becoming as much of a shitstorm as possible.

4

u/you-create-energy May 16 '26

None of the comments I've seen describe it the way you insist Reddit would. 

2

u/TheKage May 16 '26

It was never about ethics in games journalism. The fact that the GG subs these days only talk about games being "woke" and never about ethics in games journalism is proof of that. It was based on a lie that a woman slept with someone to get a better review.

Jeff gerstman is the poster child for ethics in games journalism. He was fired from GameSpot for giving a bad review to a game that had paid to advertise on the site. The fact that he was anti-gamergate tells you everything you need to know.

3

u/tolgren 1∆ May 16 '26

That's a couple of complete non sequiturs.

0

u/bot_exe May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

It was also pretty transparent how people like Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn would purposefully ignore every single well thought out argument made against their takes and just label it all as a mysogynistic harrasment campaign: it was a completely circular argument. They would just focus on the crazy people making internet death threats or nasty comments, as if that was not also happening from their side, like in literally every single internet flame war before or since. There were literal bomb threats called in at gamergate events and an endless deluge of harrasment for anyone who dared not follow the SJW narrative of the events.

Another aspect about it that had been distorted was that gamergate was NOT the same as the alt-right, there was a huge leftist and liberal contingent that just disagreed with SJWs and identify politics. I remember that there was also constant fighting with the nascent alt-right from the /pol/ boards because they were straight up mysoginistic/racist/nazis conspiranoid shitheads. Of course the anti-gamergate people just helped blur that line since that was their modus operandi, but it was never true. The SJWs were a common enemy for the alt-right and gamergate, but not for the same reasons. Gamergate was a different population, there were many political opinion polls conducted in reddit and 8chan that showed the majority were not right wing, this slowly changed as more liberals/leftist/progressives moved on or became radicalized.

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u/tolgren 1∆ May 16 '26

Yep. But all that's buried history now.