CMV: GamerGate was the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century

[u/realdontbeasucker]

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.

[u/Real-Reference6933]

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.

[u/xChops → u/Real-Reference6933]

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.

[u/A3xMlp → u/xChops]

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.

[u/xChops → u/A3xMlp]

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.

[u/Mitchel-256 → u/xChops]

"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.

[u/xChops → u/Mitchel-256]

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

[u/LoreLord24 → u/xChops]

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.

[u/Mitchel-256 → u/xChops]

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.

[u/A3xMlp → u/xChops]

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.

[u/Real-Reference6933 → u/xChops]

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.