Explain Gamergate to Me Like I Am Five-uhh-Fifty-Five Years Old Please

[poofyhairguy]

Every other major "gate" thing in existence seems to stem from some event which lead to a scandal. Like Nixon's people got caught breaking into a hotel, or in Nipplegate a boob popped out in the Superbowl, or in Weinergate a dick pic hit the internet, etc. But every single blog post explaining Gamergate reads like the script of a documentary I don't want to watch. I can't get through it all enough to find the Event 0 that made it -gate level and created the controversy. At most I kinda get that industry practices which have gone on since the 1980s and 90s suddenly became unacceptable or something because gaming has hit critical mass, but I can't find out what caused it all or even what part of the gaming industry is affected.

So would someone pretty please explain Gamergate to me like I have zero understanding about the modern gaming industry, in less than say 500 words and with no links to videos (I don't know why gamers love Youtube to explain things so much).

Thank you in advance.

And to the mods: I am sorry this is here, but I know so little about Gamergate that I don't know if it is console or PC gaming. My primary gaming platform for a while has been mobile devices so all of this is foreign to me. Please move to whatever forum is appropriate if needed.

 

[Rakehellion]

Feminist gamer accuses games/gamers of being sexist.
Feminist discovered not to a be a gamer and is a con artist.
Sexist gamers attack feminist.
Media accuses games/gamers of being sexist.

This has happened to at least 3-4 different people.

 

[KeithTalent]

Ask this guy: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2408551

Dude seems obsessed with it.

KT

 

[poofyhairguy]

Ask this guy: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2408551

Dude seems obsessed with it.

KT

That guy is the exact kind of answer I am NOT going for.

 

[lxskllr]

That guy is the exact kind of answer I am NOT going for.

From the little I've read about it, Rakehellion's got it right. Internet drama. I don't have much patience for internet drama.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Feminist gamer accuses games/gamers of being sexist.
Feminist discovered not to a be a gamer and is a con artist.
Sexist gamers attack feminist.
Media accuses games/gamers of being sexist.

This has happened to at least 3-4 different people.

What caused it all though? Was there some game release that was a Duke Nukem aka trying to be offensive? Or was just ANOTHER female character was given a set of double d knockers in a FPS, as has been the tradition since the mid 90's, and the pot boiled over?

Here is my frame of reference for comparison:

The NFL recently has been going through PR issues related to domestic abuse. The sport hit a point where it was critical mass popular in society (around 50%) and so groups with an agenda seized this popularity to push their agenda to a bigger audience. From what I get out of Gamergate it seems similar, except the NFL had the Ray Rice scandal start the fire.

What event caused Gamergate? What was the spark that made it grow huge?

 

[ImpulsE69]

Dildos...women HATE dildos...

 

[T9D]

https://chaturbate.com/female-cams/

 

[JEDI]

Every other major "gate" thing in existence seems to stem from some event which lead to a scandal. Like Nixon's people got caught breaking into a hotel, or in Nipplegate a boob popped out in the Superbowl, or in Weinergate a dick pic hit the internet, etc. But every single blog post explaining Gamergate reads like the script of a documentary I don't want to watch. I can't get through it all enough to find the Event 0 that made it -gate level and created the controversy. At most I kinda get that industry practices which have gone on since the 1980s and 90s suddenly became unacceptable or something because gaming has hit critical mass, but I can't find out what caused it all or even what part of the gaming industry is affected.

So would someone pretty please explain Gamergate to me like I have zero understanding about the modern gaming industry, in less than say 500 words and with no links to videos (I don't know why gamers love Youtube to explain things so much).

Thank you in advance.

And to the mods: I am sorry this is here, but I know so little about Gamergate that I don't know if it is console or PC gaming. My primary gaming platform for a while has been mobile devices so all of this is foreign to me. Please move to whatever forum is appropriate if needed.

I thought Gamergate was a youtube Gamer chick (zoe Quinn) that slept with one of the game article writers?
she wanted more viewers?

 

[Rakehellion]

From the little I've read about it, Rakehellion's got it right. Internet drama.

There was also:
-The whole "integrity in video game journalism" thing where one chick banged several game reviewers to get a good rating of her game.
-More than one feminist blogger completely fabricated evidence of their harassment
-More of the same old social justice warrior bullshit

I don't have much patience for internet drama.

Pretty much.

 

[Rakehellion]

I thought Gamergate was a youtube Gamer chick that slept with one of the game article writers?
she wanted more viewers?

That, and several other gamer chicks who did shady shit they shouldn't have.

 

[KeithTalent]

Internet drama. I don't have much patience for internet drama.

No doubt. It's the worst kind!

KT

 

[Rakehellion]

Or was just ANOTHER female character was given a set of double d knockers in a FPS, as has been the tradition since the mid 90's, and the pot boiled over?

I guess so. I think the start was that girl who raised some $100,000 to make a documentary about sexism in games the resulting product was factually sparse and heavily plagiarized.

 

[ioni]

Some lady released a game many thought was awful.
Some prominent review sites released good reviews on it.
It came out the dev slept with the reviewers for the good reviews.

 

[jagec]

This infuriated the gamers and they swarmed the websites exposing the lies and hypocrisy.

And a lot of those gamers were misogynistic/MRA types. Which undermined their ability to play the "free speech crusader" card.

Essentially it was a big online version of Jerry Springer, where a bunch of overly opinionated, easily enraged, eminently dislikable people got into a huge fight over nothing very important.

 

[KeithTalent]

I guess so. I think the start was that girl who raised some $100,000 to make a documentary about sexism in games the resulting product was factually sparse and heavily plagiarized.

That was that Jerry Tarkanian chick, right?

KT

 

[Atomic Playboy]

The ex-boyfriend of a female game developer posted an enormous 8,000 page word rant after they broke up accusing her of infidelity with a number of other people, including some in the gaming media. 4Chan picked up the story because it seemed sordid and a Youtube personality made a video called "Five Guys Burger and Fries" referencing the allegation that the female game developer had slept with at least five men. The actor Adam Baldwin referenced the video in a tweet and included the hashtag #gamergate, the first time the phrase had been used. So there's your ground zero.

Now, it's important at this point to note that the central claim at this point was that the game developer had slept with a gaming journalist for a favorable review for her game. This was proven false almost immediately. There was never any review written or published by anyone the game developer had been linked to and it was never established that they had a sexual relationship. But that hasn't deterred people in gamergate from continuing to raise the issue as though it weren't all based around a complete lie.

Regardless, this woman received a lot of harassment early on, and so a number of articles were released claiming that the stereotype of gamers was over (often referred to as the "gamers are dead" articles despite that phrase not appearing in them). The most noted of these was targeted towards developers saying that continuing to develop video games for a stereotypical audience made up of "obtuse shit-slingers" and "basement dwellers" was a bad move since the fanbase had moved well beyond that outdated stereotype, but many, many gamers got furious at the article assuming that it was meant to call them all "basement-dwelling neckbeards" and the like. Further harassment followed against some of the writers of these articles.

The rest of the story from there gets murky (and frankly absurd), but essentially the tag came to represent a certain group of people's anger at the media establishment. They framed it as an ethical battle early on since being seen as a harassment campaign over someone's sex life is a hard sell for most people, but in the past few months it has devolved into a strictly anti-feminist movement. There have been more instances of harassment almost exclusively targeted towards women in the gaming media/development industries, and the bulk of their claims seem to center around the fact that they don't want video games to change to accommodate women who they see as trying to take away their fun. It's a very "stay out of my clubhouse" mentality.

The practical upshot of all of this has gone almost completely against gamergate. They had an initially successful campaign to get Intel to pull its ads from a gaming website that published an offending article before Intel rescinded, reinstated the ads and pledged a further $300 million to promote diversity in the gaming industry. They made numerous threats against Anita Sarkeesian and it got her onto The Colbert Report and Nightline. They were so extreme they got banned from 4Chan. They've had every major non-gaming publication (such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, etc.) come out against them as a harassment campaign. They've pretty much had the opposite effect of their goal every single time they try to do something. At this point, most people, even those who care about ethics in the media, realize that gamergate is a poorly-collected group of people with no leadership and no central platform which has been used to wage a campaign of harassment against people they disagree with.

So, there you go.

 

[Rakehellion]

That was that Jerry Tarkanian chick, right?

KT

Yeah, it was the Serj Tankian chick.

I mean, if you raised that much money, the least you could do is actually make the damned vid. Right?

 

[Rakehellion]

The ex-boyfriend of a female game developer posted an enormous 8,000 page word rant after they broke up accusing her of infidelity with a number of other people, including some in the gaming media. 4Chan picked up the story because it seemed sordid and a Youtube personality made a video called "Five Guys Burger and Fries" referencing the allegation that the female game developer had slept with at least five men. The actor Adam Baldwin referenced the video in a tweet and included the hashtag #gamergate, the first time the phrase had been used. So there's your ground zero.

Now, it's important at this point to note that the central claim at this point was that the game developer had slept with a gaming journalist for a favorable review for her game. This was proven false almost immediately. There was never any review written or published by anyone the game developer had been linked to and it was never established that they had a sexual relationship. But that hasn't deterred people in gamergate from continuing to raise the issue as though it weren't all based around a complete lie.

Regardless, this woman received a lot of harassment early on, and so a number of articles were released claiming that the stereotype of gamers was over (often referred to as the "gamers are dead" articles despite that phrase not appearing in them). The most noted of these was targeted towards developers saying that continuing to develop video games for a stereotypical audience made up of obtuse shit-slingers and basement dwellers was a bad move since the fanbase had moved well beyond that outdated stereotype, but many, many gamers got furious at the article assuming that it was meant to call them all "basement-dwelling neckbeards" and the like. Further harassment followed against some of the writers of these articles.

The rest of the story from there gets murky (and frankly absurd), but essentially the tag came to represent a certain group of people's anger at the media establishment. They framed it as an ethical battle early on since being seen as a harassment campaign over someone's sex life is a hard sell for most people, but in the past few months it has devolved into a strictly anti-feminist movement. There have been more instances of harassment almost exclusively targeted towards women in the gaming media/development industries, and the bulk of their claims seem to center around the fact that they don't want video games to change to accommodate women who they see as trying to take away their fun. It's a very "stay out of my clubhouse" mentality.

The practical upshot of all of this has gone almost completely against gamergate. They had an initially successful campaign to get Intel to pull its ads from a gaming website that published an offending article before Intel rescinded, reinstated the ads and pledged a further $300 million to promote diversity in the gaming industry. They made numerous threats against Anita Sarkeesian and it got her onto The Colbert Report and Nightline. They were so extreme they got banned from 4Chan. They've had every major non-gaming publication (such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, etc.) come out against them as a harassment campaign. They've pretty much had the opposite effect of their goal every single time they try to do something. At this point, most people, even those who care about ethics in the media, realize that gamergate is a poorly-collected group of people with no leadership and no central platform which has been used to wage a campaign of harassment against people they disagree with.

So, there you go.

Speaking of 8,000 pages rants. Guess how much of this post I read.

 

[Jodell88]

know your meme has pretty good write up to a point.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate

And one does not have to dig deep to see bias reporting. Just this week ABC did a piece on gamergate. You can view it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ

And then apparently deleted a bunch of comments that called out the reporting. You can view them here. https://imgur.com/gallery/iX00h/new

 

[PieIsAwesome]

I've gone into some threads about the subject, read a bit, react with "uuuuuuugggggh, *barf* do I have to read this?", exit the thread and go somewhere else.

Every now and then I try to read about it again, but the same thing happens.

So if you find the "gamergate" topic unpleasant, just ignore it and move on. Its normal.

 

[zerocool84]

I also remember developers like Ubisoft getting attacked because of no main female character.

While I am against harassment, gaming is art, it shouldn't be forced to do anything. That's like forcing Dr Dre to stop talking about bitches and weed, if you don't like it, don't play it.

 

[TreVader]

Its just totally alien to me.


I'm 29 years old, and it makes no sense to me whatsoever. Maybe I'm too old for #gamergate

 

[TreVader]

Speaking of 8,000 pages rants. Guess how much of this post I read.

It was actually a good post. You should read it.

 

[poofyhairguy]

It was a good post and was exactly what was needed to explain it. Which sucks, this stuff is lame. No more Gamergate for me, back to my little simple mobile device and my JRPGS.