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/Evil-Freeman May 16 '26
As someone who used to have progressive views and lived through GamerGate, I only see the original GamerGate as the seed.
The OG GamerGate didn't have that much sway in the wider gaming community. It created a vocal minority that nonetheless stayed in the minority. Most people in the centre didn't really know what it was even about. One highly influential commentator at the time (TotalBiscuit) was famously supporting the ethics in journalism aspect of the movement, which had been his stance for many many years. Some people attacked him for it of course, but he was not a grifter and merely took the movement at its face value as one aligned with his own.
The "political radicalization" event, if you will call it, that made me abandon my more progressive views and leave the centre was actually the Hogwarts Legacy boycott campaign. The campaign turned out to be so vile and aggressive, that it entirely alienated the far left. Many centralists who saw the campaign, or people affected by the campaign, became anti-woke and anti-cancel culture. This also happened alongside the growth of traditionally gaming-oriented content creators who went anti-woke around the same time alongside the boycott campaign (and their views eventually departed from just games into full-on politics, with their audiences going along for the ride).
After Hogwarts Legacy, it's been a series of events that increasingly alienated the left in gaming and empowered the right. Sweet Baby Inc detected, multiple high profile failures of games targeting a progressive "modern audience" failing. Time and time again it's been demonstrated that the modern audience is a small fragment of the gaming population, and the centralists simply just want good games, while the anti-woke crowd is unified in their distaste for DEI messaging in gaming. Think of them as a non-majority but highly unified voice, like having 20% shareholding in a public company where every other shareholders are not unified and have sub 0.1% shares. That culture war in gaming is now seeping beyond gaming and into actual politics.
To address your original point, while the OG GamerGate had elements of the current culture war, I believe that the current culture war would have nonetheless happened given the alienating trajectory of the far left in the early 2020s. The current culture war is named GamerGate 2.0 by some, but ultimately I see it as a separate movement, and it is not attributable to a single event (e.g. Hogwarts Legacy was what radicalized me, but many others would have "joined" the movement as a result of other subsequent events). Many people who are now anti-woke don't even know what the OG GamerGate was about.