Gamergate?

Gamergate is a quite simply put, a hashtag. Being a hashtag, it can be used by anyone, to say anything. It's leaderless and for the most part anonymous.

• People have used it to complain about legitimate issues such as journos writing about/financing their dev friends without disclosure.
• People have used it to attack feminists who they see as trying to change their hobby.
• People have used it to dox and harass others.

Due to the fact that even the Reddit board has nearly 20000 subs, this is a very large and diverse group. As such, many people using the hashtag will have different goals; and like all large groups of people, there is a small but vocal segment that exists to stir up shit.

My biggest suggestion if looking into it is to treat everyone's voice as their own. Gamergate is a consumer revolt and not an organization; no one person speaks for the group.

There's a good rundown of it on RationalWiki and Vox. The Wikipedia article is not terrible, either, although obviously there's a lot of fighting over there.

But the simplest answer is that it's a bunch of gamers getting angry over nothing. None of the accusations core to the movement are significant or hold any water, and there has been no significant push within it to go after any of the actual corruption plaguing the industry (such as the use of early-review-access and advertising to pull high scores.)

The media loves controversy. It loves scandals. And it's huge and diverse and split into many different angry opinions. The reason none of the accusations GG makes have been picked up by the media (outside of a few Fox news opinion-piece commentators who openly use them to grind an axe against progressives and feminists) is because none of them hold any water. When someone tells you that the photoshop-screed they're frantically trying to link you to holds the TRUTH and that they can't offer a better source because the entire news media refuses to cover the accusations... well, draw your own conclusions.

But I think "people on reddit, 4chan and twitter are dumb and make up things all the time" is a more likely explanation than "elaborate media-wide conspiracy to protect a gaming blog."

Seriously, the whole thing could have been avoided if people were a bit more skeptical and adhered to a general rule of "don't go into a frothing anti-corruption fury over a random angry jpg someone on 4chan showed you. They are probably just yanking you around." GG is, at its heart, mostly a bunch of people getting yanked around by shitty jpg memes produced by people who hate things like Kotaku, Depression Quest, Anita Sarkeesian and so on.

(Not that Kotaku isn't trashy, because it totally is, but yellow journalism and attention-grabbing headlines are hardly new things. I'm saying that if you're driven into a righteous fury over the fact that a game journalist sometimes donates money to the kickstarters of games they review, and feel that this is a hideous miscarriage of justice that requires a giant internet movement to correct while ignoring the fact that every major publisher has been openly buying good reviews with advertising and early access since the dawn of gaming... then I think it's pretty clear your campaign is anti-Kotaku and not anti-journalism.)

Also, amusing aside, Kotaku's alexa ranking has spiked sharply since all this began. Good job, Gamergate, you're driving more people to it Kotaku.

I do think that the only lasting effect of all this, ultimately, is that there will be more attention paid to the role of women and other social or political issues in games and gaming... because ultimately, I think that the vast majority of gamers really want more diversity in the games they're offered, and most developers actually want more chances to shake up the status quo. I think that there will also likely be more reviewers who touch on social issues in gaming, not less, because this has sort of blown the doors open to that discussion and made it a hot topic. So in that sense, despite all the sound and fury I think that this can only be a good thing.

People getting agitated over video games.

First world problems. Sigh. It seems some of these people don't have a life. Stop playing video games 100 hours a week.

Thanks for Skyrim!

Gaming journalism? Gaming journalism died the moment they started selling out and doing paid reviews, turning devs/people from the industry into "stars" and reporting daily the newest crazy thing japan is doing/selling. And unless someone can turn back time it's never coming back. All these "crusaders" on both sides, lunatics aside, are doing is trying to get a bit of spot light and fling some shit at people they don't like before their moment of glory inevitably passes and people stop giving a rat's ass about anything they have to say. Trust me, a year or two from now, after the internet gets bored of watching the crap fight, no one will even remember their names. I just wish everyone would remember what's important here, the damn games.