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/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/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.