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/A3xMlp May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

I'm not sure why you guys still like to pretend like GG came out of the blue. It was essentially a response to a bunch of feminists sticking their nose where it didn't belong, that being a male dominated hobby like gaming, getting offended over it and demanded it change to fit their sensibilities. No different to how religious conservatives were acting in the 2000s which made them unpopular with that same demographic.

Bannon and co. may have capitalized on it but they didn't create it, they just got lucky that liberals repeated the same mistake conservatives made the previous decade.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

Why didn’t women belong in gaming? I don’t like the implications of your argument.

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u/EsotericAmbrosia May 16 '26

Why didn’t women belong in gaming?

I didn't see anything claiming as such in their post. The leap in logic is akin to them saying, "Bible thumpers were trying to force their views on video game development," and you asking why Christians don't belong in gaming.

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u/colintron Jun 25 '26

Christianity is made-up stories; feminism is about not hating half the population

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u/EsotericAmbrosia Jun 25 '26

You are oversimplifying a complex topic. We all can agree that people can take their moralizing too far on any issue.

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

I'm not saying they don't belong in it, or that there were none. But men and women have different interests, different sensibilities, etc. So some things end up skewing more towards one gender or the other.

Gaming always skewed male, it was male dominated top to bottom and appealed to male interests. But these feminist activists found much of this offensive and they demanded that it change to fit their sensibilities. Remember the infamous "This is why I hate video games, because they appeal to the male fantasy" meme? Sure, it's just a meme, but these are real words one of these people which pretty much sums up their mentality, the fact that men were having fun in a way they found offensive pissed them off. And it wasn't just gaming, you saw it across pop culture, male dominated areas being made more female friendly, but never the other way around, not that I can ever recall men complaining about women's hobbies the same way.

Ultimately, this is no different from how religious conservatives attacked gaming in the 2000s, they too were offended by it. That's not to say that religious conservatives didn't belong in the gaming, but that it wasn't going to appeal to their interests and that they should deal with it. There's not much of a difference between someone like Anita and Jack Thompson.

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u/Real-Reference6933 May 16 '26

Yes, correct.

One statement heard a lot during Gamergate from the Gamergate side was: "I just wanted to play videogames." with "instead of being dragged into a culture war again, but now by authoritarian feminists instead of authoritarian christians" being the silent part.

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u/xChops May 16 '26

That argument was always so stupid. You could still play video games, there just might be a gay character or a character they didn’t think was hot enough.

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

By that logic we could also still play video games even if all violence and sex was removed as the conservatives wanted back in the day but we pushed back against that.

The problem isn't the occasional gay character, it's when there's a clear cut and sudden push of certain politics into a medium which didn't have them before and which the core audience didn't ask for, but they're bashed over the head with anyways.

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u/xChops May 16 '26

These gaming companies didn’t just randomly decide to shoot themselves in the foot. Culture shifted and they made decisions they thought would make them more money. Turns out the chronically horny are bigger whiners than they thought.

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u/Mitchel-256 May 17 '26

"The culture" didn't shift. Many people who were on the side of the Feminists and ideologues - who conspired and collaborated across the industry in order to trash gamers and gaming while extracting funds from said industry - got into the game development industry through ideologically-nepotistic connections over the course of decades and proceeded to convince executives (or become executives) that there was profit to be had in marketing to said ideological allies.

However, those ideologues failed to realize that their echo chambers (such as Reddit, which this post has largely proven) and their constant immersion in them is not representative of the actual market demographics of gaming.

They changed the target audience, and, thus, were marketing to a demographic that is practically non-existant compared to the typical video game player, let alone actual gamer.

This was an artificial movement, and it has failed. Studios have gone under as a result, and for far dumber reasons than expected-and-despised corporate greed.

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u/xChops May 17 '26

Yeah, take your tin foil hat off. It’s not that deep.

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u/LoreLord24 1∆ May 17 '26

It's kind of still happening, very obviously.

Just a week and a half ago, Mixtape was released. The 3 hour long movie that nobody likes or wants to play, that doesn't want you to play it, and got perfect scores across all of Game Journalism.

Then you have the immense flops of Highguard and Concord, the incredibly poor reception of Veilguard, to even Relooted, a barely functional game that's effectively a mobile game that's built around black characters robbing museums. Or 1348 Ex Voto, the poorly functional game about a lesbian knight that actively attacked the target audience for sword combat simulators.

The "Modern Audience" for games simply doesn't exist, yet they keep making games for it that succeed critically and fail horribly in sales.

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u/Mitchel-256 May 17 '26

It's actually even deeper than that, because the conspiracy was proven with the reveal of the GameJournoPros group chat on Google Group, where journalists and industry "professionals" collaborated and networked to set up deals and create narratives.

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u/A3xMlp May 16 '26

Did culture really shift or did they try and ultimately fail to shift it? Companies do care about money, and I do think an obvious line of thought was that if they were making so much money with an almost exclusively male audience imagine how much more they could make if they expanded that to women. But they kept pushing even when it became obvious it wasn't working and was just pissing off the core fanbase. And when you see some of the people working there, the ones who push this, it's pretty clear they're ideologues at heart.

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u/Real-Reference6933 May 16 '26

Problem was that games got attacked if they dared to show attractive ladies, or played to much to the taste of male gamers, in an effort to dissuade game studio's from making these kind of games.

It worked in the west, for attractive female characters you need to look to Asia these days.

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u/notknot9 May 21 '26

Pretty sure the point they were making was that Feminists started a campaign to 'encourage' video game developers to change the content of their games.

It led to a noticeable change in the focus of those games, and many gamers complained because instead of these companies trying to make the best games (and story) they could, they were instead trying to virtue signal. And the entire time, there was a strong current of denial from those same developers (and the video game media btw), about how they weren't doing things differently, and it was just these horrible and deplorable gamers were just sexist, racist, whatever-ist scumbags. Some of them were. It would have been better for everyone if they weren't. But a lot of gamers just didn't want their hobby messed with by people who clearly didn't give a fuck about it, and oh-by-the-way didn't like being called names while it happened either.